Gods of Deception, page 103
“Alice, I can’t tell you how much I miss Teddy. I can almost see him scampering down the embankment and manhandling a tie out of the dirt to see if there was still a spike embedded.”
Alice smiled. “He’d put them in the pockets of his fishing jacket until he rattled like the Tin Woodsman … Not to mention the garter snakes and toads.”
“Hermitage lost something for me when he didn’t return from Korea. His shining spirit—the magic gone. Like a part of me, something … somehow, I’ve never managed to get back.”
Alice sighed in sympathy and closed her eyes, staring blindly at the Bush Kill where it glittered so familiarly below. “Oh, Martha … try losing your son.”
Martha laid a hand on her sister’s shoulder and adjusted the collar of her moth-eaten coat.
“Forgive me, dear, of course … you and Daddy. How selfish of me. I know I should count myself lucky with Erich and Karen. And now you have Cecily back home.”
“Let’s take a look at that letter one last time.”
Alice opened the two pages of crumpled yellowed paper scrawled in pencil, and the sisters sat together on a bluestone wall, a mosaic interlaced with mustard and olive lichen, while the Bush Kill’s incantation played in their ears.
“You read it to me, Alice.”
Alice, not a little spellbound, dug out her reading glasses.
November 28, 1950
Dear Martha:
Pardon my handwriting, I’m writing to you lying up against a rock on my back in the snow with my gloves on, not that my handwriting was ever as fine as yours, as you always let me know. Our squad has formed a skirmish line behind a ridge, mostly stumps and boulders, facing the distant snow-clad hills, which are exceptionally beautiful, with hazy tree lines running up and down in the most delicate patterns, except those hills are crawling with Chinese, who now seem to have us in artillery range.
Well, we thought we had this thing won; we pushed the Commies back to the Yalu, but nobody thought the Chinese were going to come in. They did, though, and now we’re in a fix. Up until that moment, MacArthur seemed a tactical genius, now we’re in full retreat and, to be frank, things aren’t looking so good. The men are freezing to death and can’t understand why we don’t just drop a few atom bombs on the bastards and get them off our backs.
So I figured this might be as good a time as any to get a few things off my chest, just in case. If anybody in our family can understand why I enlisted it’s probably you, although Dad and Mom know perfectly well, even if they can’t, or won’t, admit it. The Hiss trial was a sham from start to finish, among other things, because Dad always knew the truth, that at least on one count of perjury, Hiss was guilty as hell. My God, those people visited Hermitage. I remember when they arrived, although you wouldn’t, as you were too young at the time.
(Two hours later) We’ve just been in a firefight; we lost one fellow, another wounded. Frostbite is endemic, and it’s only getting colder. Batteries run down in the jeeps; even the firing pins of our weapons sometimes don’t function. I’m peering at my scrawls through my frozen breath. And I seem to have lost my train of thought as well. Jesus, it’s cold, and I thought I knew cold in the Catskills, but this is biting and relentless—and no cozy fire in the great room to retreat to. Where was I? So, it’s not that I don’t perfectly understand the role of a defense lawyer. How many times did Dad knock it into my head about our adversarial system of justice—the glories of the common law, that a man is innocent until proven guilty by a jury of his peers. How every man has a right to the best defense possible. That’s why I still plan on going to Harvard Law if I get out of this mess and finish at Yale. But, to be frank—and please don’t mention it to him—Dad’s work on the defense team sent shivers of horror down my spine. It was bad enough that a man like Hiss, and all his Commie pals, could have so completely infiltrated our government and wreaked God knows how much damage on the country. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere along the line Hiss had hoodwinked Dad, or had some kind of hold—a spell—over him, to so drag him down into that mire of deception—not to mention the perverse tactics the defense used.
It was clear that the only realistic hope to get Hiss off was to destroy Chambers—the one witness in all this who Dad, of all people, had to have known was telling the truth! Worse, using voodoo Freudian theories to try to discredit him in front of a gullible jury—thank God they didn’t fall for it. And Dad was made a laughingstock in the press and the profession. How could he have called those two charlatans, Binger and Murray, as expert witnesses? Imagine any well-run court allowing the introduction of such mumbo jumbo, hearsay, and thirdhand speculations about that poor man’s character. Any first-year law student with half a brain would have known better, and the prosecution’s cross-examination made mincemeat of Binger and Murray as expert witnesses. Even the pro-Hiss press was embarrassed. Judge Goddard, an experienced man, should have ruled against the introduction of such tainted rantings about Chambers’s private life, much less the employment of such oblique character assassination based on the witness’s writings and so-called unconscious motivation. (Surely, you don’t believe in such nonsense!) Why did Dad let it happen? Allow the defense to pillory Chambers in such an unprofessional and uncouth manner? Against everything he ever taught us? It’s the very same torturous technique of twisted half-truths, lies, character assassination, and fallacious propaganda the Communists use here and everywhere to their odious ends. It just turned my stomach. Many of my closest friends at Yale disowned me.
Frankly, I don’t understand how Dad’s judgment and sense of fair play, much less professional integrity, could have so let him down. And I don’t see his reputation recovering anytime soon. How can any selfrespecting lawyer defend a man on a count of perjury when he personally has firsthand knowledge that the indictment is true?
If I were Dad, I couldn’t live with myself.
Well, that’s about it. The light is going, my fingers are stiff, and I long to be back with you at Hermitage—I missed being there for Thanksgiving. A nice big hunk of warm turkey would suit me just fine right now. When I turn my head to the wintery hills, fading behind mist, I think of late-autumn days at Hermitage. How I ache for the smell of wood smoke and pine and the clean fresh smell of the Neversink rushing past my waders. I yearn, too, for you to be my little coxie once again, so you can guide me out on the lake like you used to when we were kids, and we can make up silly songs that echo endlessly from shore to shore. Did I ever tell you what a lovely smile you have? That secret smile when you forget for a moment about being so serious, when you leave your teeming brain ashore and begin to laugh at this crazy, beautiful world. When you are truly yourself. At Handytown, too, of course.
So keep me in your thoughts, and keep that smile going. You can even try a prayer or two, or at least touch wood for luck—the wooden head of our skyward-gazing angel by the fireplace would do. Write to me about Thanksgiving at Hermitage. And yes, wish Mom and Dad and Alice a Merry Christmas from me.
Signing off, your loving brother,
Teddy
P.S. I’ve been thinking a lot recently of those mating bald eagles over the lake, talons locked, white wheeling flames through space, like sunlit angels tumbling from heaven’s gate. Oh the magic of it, the beauty, that God created such a thing.
And by the way, do one very important favor for me: Ask Daisy to forgive me. Tell her I love her. That I miss her. That I’ll be back. Just mention: “The Dalliance of the Eagles,” by Whitman. She’ll understand.
—
Alice put her protective arms around her sister and hugged her as Martha wiped tears on her coat sleeve.
“Can you believe he was killed two days later?”
“What,” Alice asked, “do you suppose he meant … ‘Dad always knew the truth’?”
“You’re the defense lawyer—don’t you always know the truth about your client? Whatever the case.”
“And who were ‘those people’?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Why didn’t you ever share it with Daddy?”
“How could I—the last letter from his son? He’d have been devastated—at least right away. I was going to show it to him someday, so I stuck it in my organic chemistry text, but then I forgot where I’d put it.”
“Come on, Martha, you were thrilled at sixteen and seventeen with Freud, with Dad’s expert witnesses. Didn’t you take Binger’s course at Harvard? You hid that letter because it embarrassed you.”
To this, Martha remained silent.
“You’ve got to show this to Daisy Wright.” Alice looked at Martha directly in the eye. “That’s really why he wrote the letter. I know how Teddy’s mind worked. The last line was the thing that really mattered, the excuse for everything else.”
“I’m sure she seduced him.”
“Oh come now, Martha, you, of all people, know better than that.”
Alice put her arm through her sister’s and led her out onto the gravel roadbed to resume their hike. Suddenly, she paused, her eyes widening with wonder.
“Oh my God, do you remember when Teddy picked up that timber rattler!”
—
Theodore pointed once again to the Bush Kill with the stem of his meerschaum pipe. “Beautiful, isn’t it? The feel of flowing water, the lullaby of sound. You see, it got me thinking about my older brother, Stanislaw, how much he loved fishing in the river in Szklarska Poreba before the war. Summers with my father. Just the boys. My mother didn’t care for the woods. The quiet frightened her. Spiders, too. She was a city girl.” He knocked his pipe against the bluestone wall and began to refill it. “You see, Stanislaw was murdered, along with over twenty thousand of his fellow officers, by the KGB in a beautiful place called the Katyn Forest. They have a memorial there now for Stalin’s victims. Black marble, with a huge granite boulder at the center on which there is a memorial plaque to the murdered. At the top of the boulder, affixed there, is a bronze bird—a dove, I suppose—with outstretched wings, as if about to lift off and fly away. A symbol of the soul perhaps, or peace … who knows. In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I returned to Poland for the first time to pay my respects. The memorial is in a shaded grove, a place of much serenity, where slender young pines reach to the sky. Very much like it is here. You see, I think it’s been at least twenty years since I’ve been back here, since our wives accused their old man.” He lit his pipe and closed his eyes for a moment, then again stood gazing at the meandering Bush Kill through the lazy gray-blue pipe smoke. “Well, now, you see, I find myself returned to the Szklarska Poreba of my boyhood. And you understand, when I returned to Poland after all my years of, well … exile, I suppose, I was moved to tears. I realized how completely I’d dispensed with memories of my family by becoming a hotshot academic in New York—so much admired, especially by all the young women. Surely you know how it is—those kids, reminding you of the happy youth you never had. And yet, strange to say, that day, standing by the Katyn memorial, the old prayers came back to me, things I barely remembered from childhood. As you know, I’m not a religious man. But I prayed to God that the last thing Stanislaw saw, his last glimpse of life, so to speak, was of those tall pine trees, his last memory of our childhood joys before the executioner fired. Dumped into that pit with thousands of Poland’s finest.”
“Jesus, Theo, that’s just awful. You never said boo to me before.”
Theo reached out and touched Stan’s arm in a tender gesture of brotherhood.
“How come you never told me much about your family, Stan, or where your Jews came from?”
“Oh, they got out before the First World War, Czarist pogroms, while the going was still good, I guess. They made money like it was nothing.”
“Land of milk and honey, eh.”
“I was just thinking how the Judge dragged me down here when he got wind of the fact that Alice and I were going to get hitched. Not pleased she planned to marry a Communist, or at least someone who had pleaded the Fifth in a congressional hearing and served time, and so might as well be a Communist. Not someone he wished for his daughter, especially after all the shit he took for defending Alger Hiss. He took my arm—probably someplace right around here—and looked me straight in the eye. ‘So, I’ve had quite enough Communists for one lifetime, professionally and otherwise.’” Stan smiled at the memory and his reply. “And I told him, ‘Sir, so have I … so have I. You have my assurance that I will not try to subvert, much less convert, your daughter.’”
Theo smiled in recognition of a shared experience.
“Ah, yes … the talk. I was already a big shot at Columbia—professor, you know—so he went easy on me.”
“But here’s the thing, Theo.” Stan took his brother-in-law by the arm and they continued to walk, slowly ambling behind the women, who were now continuing on their descent of the Bush Kill.
“It’s been bugging me for the last hour, the view—like you say—a childhood memory. I couldn’t have been more than five—the late twenties, it must have been. Every summer we took the train to the mountains, a fancy hotel in Monticello. And, well, I just suddenly realized it had to have been this railroad, the Port Jervis & Monticello, that we rode when I was a little kid. Imagine that! All these years and I didn’t put it together. And get this, what I really remember like yesterday was when the train slowed and ascended Rose’s Point—so it was called—from the valley of the Neversink … Oh, the old engine would shudder and the cars bang in their couplings, and out the window, as far as the eye could see, white and pink, pink and white—everywhere, like it had snowed strawberry shortcake. You see, it must have been the chestnut trees in bloom—like out of a dream. Imagine that, seeing the valley full of the last of those magnificent trees, before the blight took every last one.”
Stan squeezed Theo’s arm, excited at the memory.
“Sad, how they’re all gone, like all the great hotels in the mountains—the Concord and Grossinger’s—the Borscht Belt—all gone, back when we Jews hung out together and laughed at ourselves, made fun of ourselves, so glad we’d gotten away from Europe, that some of our families had survived. And now we’re top dogs—big shots. We own it all, and nobody cares anymore where you came from; nobody laughs the way we did when we were kids.”
“You’re a lucky man, Stan. When I returned to Poland, our Jews were all gone, not a member of my family survived, except for a few distant cousins in Israel. No Communists, either, of course; they had all disappeared, as well.”
“Welcome—mazel tov, Theo—to America, where we wipe the slate clean generation after generation.”
—
George, while relating the Judge’s tales to Nancy, found the cascading voice of the Bush Kill soothing as the slope steepened, greeting the travelers with an eager refrain as they closed in on the point where the meandering stream merged with the Neversink. Oddly, the melody of the rushing water reminded him of the piece that Alice had been playing on the piano before breakfast. Just a little phrase or two—spry but haunting, evocative of memories beyond recall. He stopped to listen, all his senses attuned to the stream below, the voice, the Bush Kill fed by the same springs that fed their lake at Hermitage—the flow, gravity’s free energy, as he now imagined it, moving the little band from a world of low entropy to high, from a tranquil, ordered present into the messy disorder of the coming unknown.
The hikers were spreading out along the roadbed, drifting farther and farther apart, their ranks thinning, as if indeed prey to the second law of thermodynamics, especially for the elder group, whose pace was slowing as they took breaks to linger and rest. Entropy, thought George, sighing: the archenemy of structure and coherence, much less the generation of new information. This realization saddened him as he witnessed time’s dissolution in his aunts and uncles, even his once sprightly mother, all content to harbor their energy, to share their stories out of their comingled past and so sustain a fleeting happiness as the moments rushed them on. He recognized, too, the Neversink hike (the Judge’s Way, so he now thought of it) for what it was: his family’s lifeline, a way replete with storied memories conjured from the past. As Annie had always intimated, quoting Proust—if the Judge’s memoir was to be believed—“The only truth of life is in art.”
Prompted by such musings, George pointed to a clearing where an old cellar hole and the tumbled remnants of a bluestone wall now called out to him.
“When your great-great-grandfather arrived in the 1880s, the nearest neighbors were the Davises, although the Dimocks seldom saw them.” George had to smile at the echo of the Judge’s voice in his, the rhythm and cadence with its uncanny likeness to the hurrying Bush Kill in its eagerness to join the chorus of the Neversink. “They lived on what had once been the Mount Hope and Lumberland Turnpike, pretty much defunct even in their day, which then became the roadbed for the Port Jervis & Monticello. The Davises were dirt-poor. The old man’s name was Prosper, and his wife’s name was Iantha. Theirs was a large family of boys and at least one girl. The names of all the boys except one began with an E. There was Elijah and Elisha and Enoch and Ezekiel. The laborers building the railroad saw human tracks in the snow and found a barefoot child looking at them from behind a tree. They asked him where his boots were, and he said that Prosper had gotten up first and taken the boots.”
“That’s so sad,” said Nancy, “how there’s nothing left of those people, Elijah and Elisha and …”
“Enoch and Ezekiel,” added Erich, laughing, as if about to launch into a rap lyric.
George could now hear the distinct roar of the Neversink ahead.
“I feel sorry, Dad, for the Judge just sitting there by the fire all alone.”
“He’s cool,” said Erich. “He’s glad that we’re taking his favorite hike.”
