A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  All the while she coughed, sometimes only a hack, sometimes a long spasm.

  “What do I call you?” she asked shyly as I pulled up at the street corner near her apartment—the street itself was too narrow for anything but a bike.

  “Sgt. Charles C. O’Malley, First Constabulary.”

  “Silly! Should it be Charles?”

  “It should be, but no one ever calls me that. I’d think you were talking to someone else. ‘Chuck’ will do fine.”

  I jumped out of the jeep, opened the door on the other side, and helped her down.

  “Your mother did well with you, Chuck.”

  “That’s what she always says. . . . Now, tomorrow at noon I’ll pick you up. We might as well walk over to the Residenz. I’ll have a job lined up for you.”

  “What do you want for this?” she asked bluntly.

  “Your kids are American citizens, Brigie. Native Chicagoans. Potential voters for the Cook County regular Democratic organization. I can’t let them freeze to death this winter.”

  She nodded, not knowing whether to believe a word of it, and turned and walked down the lane to a very old building.

  Since she still didn’t really trust me or believe me, I deemed it wise not to accompany her.

  The next morning I drifted over to Polly Nettleton’s desk. I didn’t quite have the clout then I would have after we routed the werewolves, but Polly already thought I was cute. Instead of donning the sergeant mask, I put on the precinct-captain one.

  “Polly, I need a favor.”

  “Name it, you got it.” She laughed. She understood the Irish political game as well as I did.

  “We need a really good translator here, I mean one who is quick and efficient and speaks perfect English.”

  “Do we?” She raised a thick black eyebrow.

  “Don’t we?”

  “If you say so. . . . How good is he?”

  “She has a University of Chicago Ph.D. in American history. Talks as good as I do.”

  “That’s not very good.”

  “Doesn’t talk funny like you Bostonians. Her husband, panzer captain, disappeared at Kursk. She and the two kids are probably starving to death. Center Party type.”

  “Where did you meet her, Chucky?”

  “I was taking pictures over at the Bahnhof of women waiting for their men. Fidelity.”

  Polly was jotting notes. “A special friend, Chucky?”

  “Hey, Polly, she’s older even than you are!”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t imagine you with your own fräulein.”

  Much less my own frau.

  “Okay.” Polly was uncharacteristically somber. “Bring her in. We’ll see how good she is.”

  John Nettleton had been a tank commander too, I reminded myself. Good omen.

  I arrived at the parish church promptly at noon. Still wary of me, Brigie was already walking down the lane. Her family was not to get a look at me just yet.

  She was wearing what were clearly her best clothes, a somewhat newer cloth coat, pumps with moderately high heels, polished so they glowed, delicately carved silver earrings, and a small and outmoded hat. The coat was open because the landmass was teasing us with warmer weather. Beneath it she was wearing a severe brown suit, carefully pressed. Very professional and a bit pathetic. Her hair, which I now saw for the first time, was the palest of pale blond, cut short.

  “Good morning, Charles,” she said formally.

  “Good morning, Frau Doctor.”

  Without cracking a smile, she told me that the title was not proper because her husband was a doctor. Then she explained that a woman who was married to a man with a doctorate and also had her own degree should be called Frau Doktor Doktor, but that in her case either would do.

  She was a kraut all right.

  “But you, Chuck, should call me Brig or Brigie like you did yesterday.”

  Not a trace of a smile.

  “As we’d say in Chicago, Brig, the fix is in. Captain Nettleton agrees that we are in desperate need of a good translator.”

  “I have never translated, Chuck,” she said nervously.

  “You do it all the time when you talk English. Nothing to it. For the people we have it’s hard work. For you it will be a breeze.”

  Inside the Residenz she lost not only her nerve but a bit of her class.

  “I shouldn’t do this.”

  “Yes, you should,” I insisted, taking her arm and shoving her up the vast staircase with the bronze rails down which the prince bishop had once ambled.

  I figured she had reason to be anxious. Her children’s lives might well depend on the job.

  In the ballroom that had become our bull pen, she froze up even more. Head and shoulders bowed, purse clutched protectively in front of her, she looked like a woman you might see in an old photo of Ellis Island.

  “Captain Nettleton,” I began, sergeant once more.

  “Yes, Chucky?” She looked up at the two of us, and her eyes, suddenly filled with pain, riveted on Brig. She stood up slowly.

  “May I present Dr. Brigitta Richter. Dr. Richter, this is Capt. Mary Elizabeth Anne Nettleton, alias Polly Nettleton, of the Army of the United States. She doesn’t talk English very well because she’s from Boston, but otherwise she’s all right.”

  Neither woman laughed. I cannot explain the parapsychological dynamics by which women of our species communicate volumes of information in such brief interludes. I understand only the outcomes.

  Polly extended her hand. “How do you do, Dr. Richter. Don’t pay any attention to Sergeant O’Malley. He’s only an inexperienced kid from Chicago.”

  Ouch. We could do without all that truth.

  “It is my pleasure, Captain.” Brigie bowed politely and exchanged the handshake. “But he is not a bad kid, only an angel with a dirty face.”

  They both chuckled, completing the mysterious exchange by which they had decided that they were kindred spirits.

  “My face is clean!”

  “You wish to translate for us, Doctor?”

  Brig had recovered all her class. “I have not had much experience . . .”

  “Yet you speak excellent English, especially given that you learned it in Chicago. . . . Tell you what, Doctor, why don’t you sit down at the typewriter over at that empty desk and translate this dispatch into English and this one into German.”

  She handed Brig two one-page papers.

  Brig bowed again and turned toward the desk.

  “Let me take your coat.”

  “Of course; thank you, Captain.”

  Polly hung the coat on a hanger and put it on the coatrack near her desk. Brig sat down and began to type immediately.

  Sergeant O’Malley did nothing. What’s more, he said nothing, a most unusual event for him.

  “Dear God, Chucky,” Polly whispered next to me.

  “Precisely.”

  “She thinks her life and her children’s lives depend on this.”

  “Oh, yes, and not without reason.”

  “She types fast too. Classy woman.”

  “Yep.”

  “In every way.”

  “Right as always, Captain.”

  Brig pulled the first typescript out of the typewriter, put another sheet of paper in, and turned to the second dispatch.

  Within five minutes, she was back with the two papers, proud of her work no matter what anyone else’s verdict might be.

  Polly stood up to receive them. She glanced down at the English translation. Put it aside and compared the German translation with one that had previously been prepared. She looked at me and rolled her eyes.

  “Sit down, Brigitta, please. I can’t judge the German, but the English is more elegant than the one I have here.”

  “Freer, perhaps. . . . Captain, I do not want to take someone’s work away from them.”

  “My name is Polly, and you won’t, and sit down.”

  I was not asked to sit down. In fact, I sensed that I would soon be given t
he brush-off. Yet, I stayed to see exactly how these two would work things out.

  “Why didn’t you come to us before? We need someone like you around here.”

  “I did not want to beg from my conquerors.”

  “We’re not conquerors, Brigitta.”

  “It is true . . . Polly”—she hesitated over the name—“that you protect us from far worse. Yet . . .”

  “Look, suppose I beg you to take the job?”

  “That won’t be necessary, Polly. I will be honored to work for you.”

  “With me. . . . Did you want something, Sergeant O’Malley?”

  “No, ma’am.” I saluted sharply and walked away with as much military dignity as I could muster. Witches.

  Thus began the rehabilitation of Brigitta Richter. There was little work for me to do in the project, other than to bring toys at Christmas to the two Richter kids, pale, waiflike, shy children with their mother’s hair and eyes. They did, however, permit me to identify with them against all the grown-ups. For the first time in my life—though God knows not the last—I had become Uncle Chuck. They in turn became Hank and Connie.

  I was barred from all other efforts on Polly’s premise that as a man I had no sense in these matters—a proposition that was unarguable. Nonetheless, tears pouring down her face, Brig thanked me with a light peck on the cheek and an apology for how rude she had been that day at the Bahnhof

  “I would have crawled on my knees and begged for the job if it had not been for my terrible pride.”

  “Self-respect.”

  Polly Nettleton took care of medicine, clothes, food, new furniture, and lights. In a few weeks, certainly by Christmas, Brig was hardly recognizable as the woman I had photographed at the Bahnhof. Her face filled out, her figure rediscovered its appropriate shape, her hair became glossy, she dressed tastefully and even smiled and laughed, and her natural beauty bloomed again.

  Hers was an unusual and utterly unconventional beauty: a slim figure with curves that were more hinted at than defined, a long and slender face that seemed to be carved out of flawless ivory by a delicate tool, white-blond hair that clung to her head like a halo, and a natural grace of posture and movement that suggested a mystical ballet. In fact, Brigie often reminded me of the sculpture of a saint in the Dom, an ethereal, mysterious, numinous visitor from another world.

  A man could not look at her for long without wanting to embrace her and undress her and revel in her uncanny appeal.

  So, in our sex-starved and affluent Army of Occupation, many men tried to do all of these things, without success. Brig was a chaste and prudent matron of the sort the Scripture celebrates. Moreover, every afternoon she walked up—and later biked up—to the Bahnhof to wait for her husband.

  She would talk to men (almost always officers of course) and attend dinners or concerts with them. But it stopped there. No kissing, no embracing, and no hint of the possibility of anything else.

  It frustrated the hell out of a lot of guys and served them right. Their conquests had been too easy and they had become too clumsy.

  And darling Chucky was always there to listen and offer limited and occasional advice.

  I have no idea why she would pick someone a dozen years younger for her father confessor.

  The most persistent and by far the smoothest of her suitors was my old friend Maj. Sam Houston Carpenter of the CID, cordially despised by all right-thinking Constabs. He was smooth, charming, attentive, and at first unthreatening. He did manage a few kisses and embraces, about which Brig would later have many guilty feelings.

  “I am married,” she said to me. “I should not kiss other men.”

  “Depends upon the kiss.”

  “Neither modest nor passionate.”

  “Risky.”

  “I know.”

  I personally thought that for all his gracious allure and his pretense to be unthreatening, Sam Carpenter was about as safe as a water moccasin. I was not quite so blunt with her, but when asked, I said frankly I wouldn’t trust him with a used ticket to a Cubs doubleheader.

  “You don’t understand Sam,” she said again.

  When a woman says that you don’t understand a man, it’s a sign that she’s falling for him (and vice versa I guess). Sam worried the hell out of me. I had come to believe that Kurt was dead, but why not go after some presentable single man, preferably Irish and Catholic and rich (or let one such come after you), rather than a married cracker.

  I worried.

  Had I given Brigitta a new chance on a life that would end up a horror?

  Playing God again.

  I never figured out how to cope with, much less understand, Brig’s affection for me. It was clearly not an invitation.

  So I had said, my face isn’t dirty.

  She had laughed.

  Those women all found you sexually attractive, my current bedmate informs me.

  Nonsense. I was a pint-sized, red-haired, freckle-faced loudmouth. Cute maybe, but not a sex object.

  You still are all of those things, maybe even cuter with the white in your hair and that adorable beard, she says, laughing, and draws me close. And you are still sexually attractive.

  To you.

  She leads my hands to her breasts. To every damn woman that looks at you. I hate them all. I even hate that Brigitta for daring to look lustfully at you even if it was almost a half century ago.

  She would never have gone to bed with me.

  Maybe not. But I’m sure she enjoyed thinking about it. Particularly that night. No doubt she was grateful that you didn’t proposition her but also a little sorry.

  I never know whether to believe her when she makes such assertions because they are usually a prelude to passionate actions that give me little time at the moment to ponder what she has said.

  17

  In early August, Special Agent Clarke showed up and demanded that I help him find Trudi and her family. I knew I had to stop him from turning those three women over to Russian rapists, but I had no idea how I was going to do it. Lancelot at bay.

  At noon I walked over to the Dom, the glorious, if confused, cathedral that was the center of the “Bishop’s Town” on the left bank of the Regens River. I had not engaged in much dialogue with the Almighty for several months because I was technically in the state of mortal sin and had stopped going to mass on Sunday, religious negligence that shocked me when I bothered to think about it.

  An old priest, clad in a tattered and soiled cassock, spit out a furious curse in German at Mary’s portal to the Dom. Perhaps he had a point. The American occupation army had thoroughly corrupted Bamberg—prostitution, drugs, black markets, smuggling. On other occasions I would have replied to him with a quote about Christians loving one another and the observation that, while we Irish had converted this area to Christianity, we clearly had not done a very good job.

  But I didn’t want to make Himself any more unhappy with me than he already was.

  The Dom is a subtle mix of Romanesque and Gothic, built by the Emperor Henry the Pius at the beginning of the eleventh century and redone by Bishop Otto in the thirteenth. It was cool and dark inside and I started to shiver again. I stared up at the most famous of the wonderful medieval sculptures, Der Reiter von Bamberg—the Rider of Bamberg. He was supposed to represent all the admirable qualities of German knighthood, such as these might have been.

  If I were like you, I observed, I might be able to pull this off. You’re tall and powerful and graceful with long, blond hair and a strong face and complete self-possession. I’m a runty, freckle-faced redhead, clumsy and cowardly and maybe a little sneaky. All I have is quick wit, an even quicker tongue, sometimes dangerously quick, and a surplus of phony Irish charm. Did you have to save any women back there in the thirteenth century?

  The Rider did not deign to answer.

  So I turned to Himself.

  “I know You’re upset with me,” I began, hoping that my phony Irish charm might be acceptable in heaven, “and I don’t bl
ame You. But if Fr. John Raven is right, You still care about me. So maybe You’ll listen to me. I didn’t ask for any of this. It’s not my fault that Gen. Radford Meade thinks I’m his ace troubleshooter, is it? That’s based on bad information about my past. It’s not my fault I saved Trudi from those black-market GIs who were trying to kill her, is it? It’s not my fault that I have to save her and her mother and sister from being turned over to the Russians, is it?”

  I paused, waiting for a response and well aware that I was whining and had left out some important details.

  “You don’t want me to turn those poor women over to the Russkies for gang rape, do You? Okay. They were Nazis. But a lot of women around here were Nazis too. We are not about to send them to the Russkies, are we?”

  No, leave them here in Bamberg where we Americans can rape them.

  “So I bought all the American propaganda during the war. All Germans are guilty, especially those who were Nazis. But where does collective guilt get you? Can I betray these women? Yet what will my family think if I’m caught and end up doing time in Fort Leavenworth?”

  I really shivered at the picture of my mother and father and my brother and sisters visiting me in prison.

  “I’m not expecting any miracles,” I continued. “Just a little bit of help in getting them away from that FBI jerk.”

  Silence.

  “I’m sure You can arrange that. I know I can’t deal with You, but just the same I’ll start going to mass again, maybe even every day like I did when I was in high school.”

  Two years ago when I was fourth-string quarterback on the Fenwick football team, a team that had only three strings, that’s when all my troubles started. It seemed like a century ago.

  “So I hope You can see Your way clear to lending a hand.” I made the sign of the cross, rose, genuflected, and slipped out of the church into the brilliant sunlight. At the Mary portal I looked up at St. Elizabeth, the prophet who praised the Christ child at the time of His presentation in the temple. She looked just like my mother, the good April, determined, handsome, shrewd, compassionate.

  I shivered again as I thought how I had let Mom down. I had arrived in Bamberg serenely confident that I would not be corrupted by the temptations of an army of occupation. I was a good Catholic with twelve years of Catholic schools, yet I had quickly fallen from grace. Not the way other GIs had fallen from grace perhaps. But still I was living in a state of mortal sin and was now prepared to violate my oath of office to my country.