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CHAPTER 1

For Isaiah Neuhaus

If one day can mark a person forever, what of two days? Those two days, when I knew your father, when he was young, have marked me since. I can tell you what I know of his story only by telling you the marked part of mine. Your father. His mother. My son. Each life altered, or ended, by events that for you can be a source of indelible pride, your patrimony, a legacy from which to take the measure of all that honors the memory of your father. But these are events that had a different meaning for me, the measure of which, I tell you at the start, is the sadness you may already sense in the space between these words. I have never told this story to anyone. Because your father asked me to, I am telling it to you.

People of my generation, ahead of his, saw so little as it actually was then, as if the Manichean division of the world into East and West, bad and good, gave shape also to our most intimate relationships. An iron curtain ran not just, as Churchill put it, from the Balkans to Trieste, but between those of us who claimed to be grown and in charge and those, like your father and my son, who seemed still so unfinished and, as I thought of them, vulnerable. When Michael was away from me, I often feared that he would get lost, which was my way of fearing, I suppose, that I would lose him. It was a fear I could not acknowledge as being more for myself than for him, because I had yet to reckon with what I had already lost.

What characterized our personal East-West division — broadly dubbed in America a few years later as the generation gap — was that Michael was the wounded one. That was presumptively a function of his longtime status as a handicapped child, but then it also became a matter of my efficient pretense that the loss we'd undergone together the year before was more his than mine, as if what I did was for him, never for myself. Thus, if the world we'd inherited was to be a jungle, I would be Michael's brush cutter, leading the way through impassable thickets with my machete, hacking out a path for him, calling over my shoulder, "This way, son. This way." Not noticing until too late that he had stopped following. That he had disappeared.

This story, which I've told myself a thousand times, always begins with the sixth stroke of the clock, the grandfather clock with the elaborately carved oaken case that I hear ticking now, not far from where I sit writing in my old house in New York City. In our German days, the clock was in the sitting room of the big house the bank had leased — not for me, since five nights out of seven I was there alone, but for the holders of my position. I'd found the clock in a warehouse near the Rhine: all Europe could still seem a flea market in those years, with the fine things of a lost world for sale cheap. I bought the clock, I think, to stake a claim to the timbered mansion assigned to me, and the sonorous Westminster gong wafted through those lonely rooms like the regular greeting of a friendly ghost.

If any house had the right to be haunted, it was that one. It was built after the First World War in Dahlberg, a near suburb on the opposite side of Frankfurt from the factory and rail yard district, which was why it had not been bombed in the Second. After those two wars, Germany was a nation of ghosts, an infelicitous place for a man and a boy yoked together by blood and affection, of course, but also by that knot of loss. We never asked it of each other, but our question was, If she can vanish from our lives, why then can't you from mine?

Five, beat, six. I remember looking up from that day's Frankfurter Neue Presse, a newspaper I felt obliged to look at as a way of improving my German. "Improving" overstates it perhaps. In my months in the country, I had come up against a linguistic mental block, and German had so far remained impenetrable to me, a blow more to my pride than my professional performance, since everyone in banking spoke English. All that week, however, I had been especially motivated to decipher the local news. As I lumpishly tracked through the text of a particular story, the clock had struck six. Without being aware of it, I had kept the count, and it was exactly then that the question first rang in my head: Where is Michael?

It was late in April 1961, a Friday evening. I looked up from the paper fully expecting to see Michael's shyly grinning face in the archway that marked the entrance foyer off from the sitting room. I saw the tall green ceramic-tiled brazier on the near side of the arch, and through the arch, the mahogany bench onto which Michael would have dropped his bag and his stick. In a trick of a mind ready to worry, his absence supplied a vivid sensation: an image in the vacant air of his lanky, thin frame at a slouching angle, the loose posture of a young man with leg braces.

"Hey, Dad."

Is he grinning? Has he left behind his anger at me? Our first awful fight.

"Hay is for horses," I would have said, a daring echo of what had been his mother's good-humored correction. Humor as a ladder out of the pit of hurt.

But where is he?

April 1961. The newspapers had been full of what came to be called the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the first shocking failure of the young Kennedy administration. There is no way to convey now the palpable sense of danger with which we all lived in those years. Kennedy and Khrushchev were like the cowboy gunfighters then dominating movies and television, men forever on the verge of drawing weapons, but weapons that would kill us all. Political fear was entirely personal, but personal fear, for that reason, could seem nuclear, too. Worry that something had happened to my son, or, if I was lucky, that he was only angry at me, was as deeply unsettling as my fear of what I read in our awful newspapers.

But the news story I had been trying to follow that week was about an event that had taken place right in front of me, as if to warn that even a life like mine could be dangerous. On the previous Monday, I had attended a conference of Germany's major steel producers at Rhine-Main Hall, a new convention center in the reborn heart of Frankfurt. The meeting had been called by the Bonn Ministry for Economic Cooperation. Gathered in a function room were about two hundred dark-suited men, mostly German but also including European Coal and Steel Community delegates and a smattering of financiers from various countries, of whom I was one. At meetings like this, the language spoken was always English, which was a main reason my German never improved. The purpose was to lay the groundwork for the creation of an ECSC consortium to develop iron imports from Africa.

The third of a number of speakers in the afternoon session approached the podium, a distinguished-looking man who — thin, tall, well tailored, and bald — reminded me of Britain's Prince Philip. I had actually been thinking of slipping out, but the agenda notes identified him as having lived in Moravia for a decade as the representative of Rheinstahl, one of the great German steel companies. He had no doubt been acquiring options on Liberia's inland iron mines, and his on-the-ground experience in Africa set him apart from the other speakers, and I decided to hear what he had to say. At the podium, he opened the folder that held his notes, took a sip of water, and was about to speak when a man appeared from behind a curtain at the edge of the stage. He crossed quickly to the speaker, approaching from the rear, and before the speaker noticed him, the man extended his arm, seeming to touch the speaker in the back of the neck. Then the shot, the first such sound I had heard since the war. It was a tinny noise I did not recognize, since my experience of gunfire had always been outdoors. Then the man fell forward, and an image of the crimson spray had remained with me all week.

Michael, where are you? I am sure it was a Friday, and I am sure of the time, because on Fridays Michael always caught the 4:07 from Wiesbaden to Frankfurt, then the 5:20 from the Hauptbahnhof to the Dahlberg station, and then it was a ten-minute walk to our house, even for Michael, whose gait was awkward but steady. This distance he insisted on covering by foot, a point of valiant stubbornness to which I relented because I knew how he hated being taken for disabled when, as he put it once, he was only slow. I knew also that his doctors in New York had encouraged him to walk as much as he could. On that one day of the week, I made it a habit to be home by 5:30 so that I would be there when he came through the door with his sack und pack and stick at 5:50.

But quickly I remembered that this Friday was to be different. Michael was to be home at the usual hour, but he was coming back to Frankfurt not by train but by car, my car, which he was driving. That realization made me sit up, the trite reaction of every parent who'd ever overcome a qualm to let a teenager take the car. At the end of the previous weekend, he had made a rare request, asking if he could drive back to school instead of taking the train. He knew I didn't need the car during the week, since my job brought with it a car and driver. And he knew, I think, how pleased I was that he had taken so naturally to driving, despite his handicap. It was the beauty of the then new automatic gearshift — in truth, he'd have had trouble with a clutch — and I'd bought the snappy Fairlane convertible the summer before thinking of him as its eventual driver. The pleasure I'd seen him taking at the wheel since obtaining his license was my pleasure, too. All of this went into his clear assumption that I would say yes.

"But boarders are forbidden to have cars," I said.

"Just to and from Wiesbaden," he offered. "I'll leave it parked for the week. The dorm director will never know."

I saw how he had allowed himself to count on it, which, perversely, may be what prompted my initial no, as if the boy needed a lesson against presumption. Michael was seventeen years old, a senior at the American high school in the charming spa city near the Rhine, fifty miles away. Eisenhower had made Wiesbaden his headquarters after crossing the Rhine, and by our time it served as headquarters for the U.S. Air Force in Europe — "U-Safe," in the argot. The sons and daughters of NCOs and officers who lived in Wiesbaden's several American enclaves attended the school, but not only them. A three-story dormitory also accommodated the teenage children of U.S. servicemen stationed across Europe. And some additional students, like Michael, were children of American civilians with Defense Department connections — NATO-attached tech reps for Lockheed or Martin-Marietta, say, or cigarette wholesalers charged with supplying the vast PX system of the occupation army.

My own DoD connection was thin, and ran through New York, not Washington. I was chief of the Frankfurt office of the Chase International Investment Corporation, a spinoff of Chase Manhattan Bank, which had begun a decade before as a main funnel for Marshall Plan funds when American investment shifted from governments to businesses. The war had left the Continent starved for consumer goods, and German manufacturers, with the advantage of needing to retool from scratch, had pounced on the market. Those of us at Chase — investing not in the state bureaucracies but in individual entrepreneurs and private companies — embodied the beau ideal of American democracy, what would later come to be called free-market capitalism. So we were frontliners in the Cold War, too, and it did not hurt that returns on our investments were running at thirty or forty percent, which set off a second-stage boom in finance as the industrial recovery of the Bundesrepublik began to fuel itself. We called it the bottom-line blitzkrieg.

People like me, in our recognizably American Brooks Brothers tailor-mades, prided ourselves on having nothing to do with the omnipresent but culturally isolated U.S. military, who, out of uniform, favored Ban-Lons and double-knits. We did not shop in their commissaries, and we did not work out in their gyms. Our chauffeurs drove us in Taunus sedans or Mercedeses, decidedly not Oldsmobiles. And we spoke German — or, as in my case, felt guilty if we did not.

If we had school-age children, they boarded at English public schools, Swiss convent schools, or back home at New England prep schools. Rarely would the child of someone in my position have been a candidate for General H. H. Arnold High School at Wiesbaden Air Base, a putative reproduction of a small-town American secondary school. But it seemed the right place for Michael that year, and as for me, I wanted him close.

When he was little, Michael was a boy who loved movement above all — if possible, on wheels, so his love of driving was no surprise. The first real change in his life came with his tricycle, a Christmas present when he was four or five. It was a machine on which he could demonstrate his true character — his daring, his restlessness, his bright assumption that the earth was flat so that he could go fast. When I would come home in the evening, nothing would do but that I take him down to the basement of the apartment building where storage cages lined a labyrinthine passageway that Michael regarded as his personal racecourse. I recall chicken wire stretched onto lumber frames, naked light bulbs on the ceiling every twenty feet or so, a succession of right-angle turns. His circuit was quick and, with all that cushiony chicken wire, I thought, safe. But near the doorway to the stairwell, one sharp cinderblock corner jutted into his path, a hazard I had never noticed because he always cut by it easily. Once, however, I made a pretense of giving chase, which made Michael laugh and pour it on. As he barreled through the maze now, pulling away, he tossed triumphant looks back over his shoulder at me. He disappeared around a last turn, I heard his crash, and knew at once he'd hit the cinderblock angle. He took the sharp edge on his face, breaking his nose and opening a gash in his forehead from which blood was gushing, as from a pump, by the time I got to him. The sight of his wrecked face filled me with panic and guilt, but he remained calm. Stunned into calm, I thought, but that wasn't so. Michael was in pain, awash in blood — crimson spray — but he wasn't afraid because he was certain that nothing bad would happen to him if I was there.

But I wasn't there some years later, the day he came home early from school — he was ten years old, it was April of 1954. He was a student at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, in Morningside Heights. Edie was a volunteer docent — a sort of guide — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she was there when the school nurse called to say she was sending Michael home in a taxi because he had a fever. I was in Washington, preparing to leave for Paris as part of a government delegation. Edie called me that night and described fever, headache, loss of appetite, vomiting. I would have come home, but she said the doctor had labeled it flu and was confident the symptoms would abate in a day or two, and they did. Soon Michael was back to normal and returned to school, and I boarded a plane to Paris. Two days later, Michael's symptoms came raging back, accompanied by the general muscular weakness known as paralysis. I was in a meeting with finance ministers, in a room with extremely high ceilings and Palladian windows overlooking the Tuileries, when an officious clerk interrupted to hand me a telegram: "Come home now. M. has poliomyelitis. E."

I remember being struck by the fact that Edie, not spelling out Michael's name or her own, had spelled out the full Latin name of the disease, preferring it no doubt to the blatantly descriptive "infantile paralysis." I remember also feeling a blast of anger at the injustice of it, since that was the spring of Jonas Salk, and the broad assumption was that the scourge of polio had been defeated. Indeed, Michael would be one of the last American children to succumb.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Secret Father"
by .
Copyright © 2003 James Carroll.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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