A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  He stiffened. “You’re joking!”

  “No, I want to see the prints first.”

  So we haggled over photography for an hour or so. The prints still hang in the office of my house in the dune—Heinkels, Junkers, Focke-Wulfs, Messerschmitts—and are probably worth a hundred thousand dollars now. At least.

  I gave him the twelve fifty-dollar bills I had brought along. He put them in his pocket.

  “You should count them.”

  “Nein.” He rolled his eyes.

  “What are you going to do with the money?”

  None of my business, but I was curious as to what kind of camera equipment he might buy.

  That was not what was on his mind.

  “A wife.” He lowered his eyes shyly. “I now have enough money to marry. You wonder who she is? A young woman from Bamberg of course. Husband killed in the war. A small child. Girl. Very lovely, the mother I mean. Daughter too. We will be happy.”

  “I’m sure you will.” I shook his hand. “Congratulations!”

  And despite the pleasure of my dates with Nan, I continued to mourn for the lost Trudi.

  29

  I spent my Christmas leave in Rome that year, after another of my by then routine searches through Stuttgart. It was a disaster. Christmas is not the same, I would learn to my dismay, in the Mediterranean countries as it is in Northern Europe: not like the kind of warm, noisy family festival that it had become in the countries where winters are cold and hearts are distraught in the darkness of night. I learned also that Rome is one of the least religious cities in the world and that beneath the splendor and pomp of papal ceremonies there is hypocrisy and unbelief. I would remember that later when I went to Rome for other purposes.

  “An empty place,” I said to my priest recently after doing a book on the pope and the Vatican.

  “Indeed.” His nearsighted eyes blinked rapidly. “As to intelligence, sensitivity, and Christianity.”

  “I hope it shows in my pictures.”

  “Those who have eyes to see, as Himself put it, let them see.”

  “Do they realize how bad they look to the rest of the world?”

  “Consider that Rome”—he tapped me on my chest—“is a proof

  that God protects Catholicism with Her special love.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He beamed happily, as he always does when he makes a point. “We have been able to survive the corruption and the idiocy of the Romans.”

  Not an original argument with the good bishop, but still valid.

  However, for a nineteen-year-old boy, sitting in a sidewalk café on the Via della Conciliazione on a warm and sunny Christmas morning and dreaming of Christmas at home, such wisdom was not available. The dirty, scruffy Vatican clergy with their haughty eyes and thin lips did not seem to have the Christmas spirit. Nor did the crowds of Romans who were able to celebrate the holiday without the need of going to mass—or when they went to mass without the need to remain silent during its most sacred moments.

  I tried to read one of the English-language newspapers: Italy had a new republican constitution, the Greeks were driving back Communist rebels, a new political “third force” was emerging in France. Sugar Ray Robinson had defeated Chuck Taylor and retained his welterweight boxing title.

  I crumpled the paper in disgust. Who cares?

  Tears of homesickness stinging my eyes, I recalled our family carol sings—Peg with her incredible violin, Mom on the harp and singing soprano with Rosie, Jane and Michael doing the alto, Dad a solid if pedestrian bass, and me carrying, with considerable protest, the tenor line.

  By the time I came back, Mike would probably be a bass too. Tall people are basses, short people tenors, right?

  “Mom, it isn’t fair that Chucky has a voice like that!”

  “Hush, Peg dear, God gives each of us what we need. Besides he and Rosie blend so nicely, don’t they?”

  That Christmas in Rome I would not have minded being kidded about how well Rosie and I blended with each other.

  I had found a priest hearing confessions in English in St. Peter’s on Christmas Eve and made my peace finally with God in the matter of Trudi Wülfe.

  “I committed sins of action with a woman, Father, scores of times.”

  “Scores? How many scores?”

  “Six, seven.”

  “The same woman?” He did not seem angry, but then why should he be? If anyone had reason to be angry, it might be God.

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Are you still seeing her?”

  “No, Father. It’s over. Irrevocably.”

  “She is dead?”

  “No, Father, but . . . well, gone.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You intend to avoid the occasions of these sins in the future?” He sounded young, perhaps ordained only a year or two.

  “As best I can, Father.”

  “That’s all God expects of us.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  He probably had me perfectly pegged. A GI with a German mistress. There were other details, but he would not care about them and they would not make any difference anyway.

  “How old are you, my son?”

  “Nineteen, Father.”

  “You have your whole life ahead of you—marriage, family, children, grandchildren. You don’t want to endanger that, do you?”

  “No, Father.”

  “I’m sure you know the risk of disease in these kind of relationships.”

  Disease? With Trudi?

  Well, why not? There had been men before me, had there not?

  “I don’t think that would have been a problem in this case, Father.”

  “You cannot be sure of that. And you must be aware of the dangers of pregnancy and a marriage you don’t want.”

  What about a marriage that I did want? Or thought I wanted?

  “Yes, Father.”

  So I was assigned a rosary and adjured to go and sin no more.

  I felt that God understood, more or less. I only wished that I could understand.

  “God is quite ruthless,” my little bishop sighs. “He pursues us in all relationships, even those of which his servants the moral theologians and the Church leaders disapprove.”

  “It was a ménage à trois?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past God.”

  If he is right—and his boss, Cardinal Sean Cronin (a distant cousin of the good April’s), says that he always is—then I can make some sense out of the triad of Trudi and God and me.

  But that is now. Long ago, sitting at the sidewalk café, nursing my cup of cappuccino and feeling utterly isolated from the rest of the human race, I saw for the first time how disgraceful my behavior in Bamberg had been. I had used a frightened young woman. I was complacent with my conquest, even though I had confessed it as a sin and promised I would not do it again.

  I might indeed not do it again, but until that moment I had felt little remorse. I had soothed my conscience with the consolation that I had after all saved her life—probably anyway.

  What would my mother or my sisters think of me if they knew what I had done?

  They would be ashamed of me. And I ought to be ashamed of myself.

  What would Rosie think of me?

  It was none of Rosie’s business.

  And in feeling that I should be ashamed, I was ashamed. Bitter waves of remorse swept over me like a rising tide in a storm. I did not weep, but I wanted to weep.

  I drained my cappuccino cup and hurried back to the little hotel off the Piazza della Repubblica that catered to American GIs. Since I could neither cry nor drink myself out of my loneliness and remorse, I did the next best thing.

  I escaped from reality by sleeping through the rest of Christmas.

  I awoke at three the next morning, still lonely, still remorseful, still disgusted with myself, still incredulous at how badly I had let my family down.

  Please, God, don’t let them fin
d out.

  I was still preoccupied with my guilt and had little time for thought about the evolving cold war and the Berlin airlift, which saved our former enemies from hunger, cold, and the Russians that winter. The Russians had closed all the ground routes to Berlin, thus violating the agreement about access to that city. So Allied planes flew supplies—five thousand tons a day—into the small Tempelhof airport in the center of the city for eleven months. The Russians finally backed down. When John Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, it was in praise of the bravery of the people of Berlin during this siege. So quickly do enemies become allies!

  I continued to dream about Trudi and my family, vague, horrible dreams in which Mom and Jane and Peg and Rosie became confused with Trudi and denounced me, together with her, for my sins.

  30

  What happened to the people who had been my family while I was in Bamberg?

  The Constabulary was rolled up in 1949 when the new Federal Republic took over police duties. Loyal to the end, Time and Life both celebrated its great accomplishments in “bringing order to chaotic, postwar Germany.”

  We had not done all that badly at a job that was not all that difficult. Still, if a stumblebum such as me had become one of its folk heroes, the Constabs were not all that hot a unit.

  In January of 1948, Kurt began teaching again at the university, as had his father before him. They named their new son Karl, which I thought was excessive. Eventually Brigie also began to teach. She won an American prize for her major book on how European historiographers had viewed American history—a fairly acerbic book for the gentle Brigitta. Her husband served as a member of the Bundestag (the federal parliament in Bonn) and became rector of the university in Bamberg.

  General Radford Meade became Army chief of staff.

  The Nettletons went back to Boston and became involved in local and national politics and raising a large family. John was a staff member of the Kennedy White House. The son who was conceived in Germany died twenty years later in Vietnam. A younger daughter did time in prison as part of the Berrigan crowd. She later returned to the family. The Nettletons nonetheless continued to be happy despite the sufferings. I see them at least once a year.

  Der Alte, Konrad Adenauer, did indeed become the first chancellor of the German Federal Republic. Despite my predictions, he continued in office for fourteen years, resigning his office in 1963 at the age of eighty-seven. He continued in the Bundestag until his death four years later. He was truly one of the great men of the twentieth century. He and I would meet again. I was always Herr Roter to him and he Herr Oberbürgermeister to me, even when the proper title was Herr Reichskanzler.

  Sam Houston Carpenter disappeared. He never ran for public office. Dick McQueen made a fortune in real estate development in California and was a political ally of Ronald Reagan’s.

  I don’t know what happened to Rednose Clarke and I don’t care. Someday maybe I’ll ask some people I know at the Bureau about him.

  Nan married her Ben Harding. They returned to Kansas and his family bank, which was very successful during the fifties and sixties. They had three children. Nan died of cancer in her early forties. She told me as I held her hand on her deathbed that she didn’t mind dying young because she had enjoyed such a happy life.

  Jack Berman is a distinguished psychoanalyst in New York and has written two books on survivors of the holocaust. We have lunch occasionally when I venture to Manhattan.

  Max Albrecht became a world-famous photographer of airplanes. I bump into him and his wife occasionally, the latter as pleasant and happy a woman as I have ever met. Not one of your intense and neurotic Irish-matriarch types.

  Trudi and Rosemarie? That’s another story. Maybe a couple of other stories.

  Most men of my generation look back on the late forties with what I consider shallow nostalgia. They had great times, they tell me, they grew up in those years, they became men, they found out who they were. Those were the good old days.

  That was not my experience at all. I still shiver when I think of that bitter wintertime of my life. I didn’t grow up. I didn’t find out who I was. Those were not the good old days.

  Mom would say when I came home that I had grown up. Dad would say that the Army had made a man out of me.

  All of this is nonsense. I had not grown up. Perhaps I never grew up. The Army had not done anything positive for me. The notion that it turns a boy into a man is nostalgic rubbish. The “service” has never really helped anyone. I didn’t learn much during those two years, a little about myself maybe and a little about humankind. But not very much about either. I had met some interesting people, taken some reasonably good pictures, and seen a few marvelous works of art. I had grown in years perhaps but neither in wisdom nor grace.

  Or so I thought for most of my life. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I did grow up a little, but not in the expected direction for someone who really wants to grow up.

  John Raven and I fought it out after I returned home.

  Trudi?

  Of course she loved you, Chuck.

  I would have married her.

  I think she disappeared because she knew you would and that it would not work. She loved you too much to marry you.

  I did a lot of damn fool things.

  Chuck, you are the most brilliant and eccentric child of a brilliant and eccentric family. You’ve got to make your peace with the fact that you’re a whimsical genius, dazzling but a little unusual.

  I don’t want to be brilliant. I don’t want to be a genius, I don’t want to be dazzling, and I especially don’t want to be defined as unusual. I just want to be an accountant and live a normal, quiet life. I’m just an ordinary person.

  You can look back on the last ten years and say that?

  Why not?

  Also you have a compassionate heart so large that it could embrace the whole world.

  I do not. I’m a nasty, mean son of a bitch. And a heartless cynic too!

  John laughed at me and we agreed to disagree. I’m still not sure after all these years which of us was right. Maybe I wrote this book to try to work it out in my head.

  31

  I did not recognize my parents on the day I was honorably discharged from the Army of the United States.

  Somewhere in the Quonset-hut barracks a radio was playing “Buttons and Bows,” a description of the kind of old-fashioned woman who was not waiting for me. I sighed and shoved Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One into my khaki duffel bag, on top of The Heart of the Matter. I began to zip the bag, tugged at the last obstacle, shoved the books down deeper, and quickly, before something else could pop up, pulled the zipper to the end.

  I sighed again and walked out into the crystal sunlight of Fort Sheridan. Master sergeant or not, I did not like the Army. My two years of service in postwar Germany had earned the money for my college education and corrupted my morals. I was happy to leave the service, happy to be almost home in Chicago, happy that I would see my parents again. I was even happy that I had come home without any romantic entanglements—no German wife following me, no American girlfriend waiting eagerly for me.

  It was the sort of postcard June day in which Chicago specializes, a day that not even the down-at-the-heels Fort could ruin: clear blue sky, light breeze, temperature in the low eighties, almost no humidity. The lake was a darker blue, color coordinated with the sky. On a Sunday like this, when you’re coming home, you should be happy to be alive. The golf courses and the beaches would be jammed. Kids would be running and screaming. Softball games would be about to begin. Young lovers everywhere in the city would be holding hands against the coming of winter.

  I didn’t play softball or golf; I wasn’t a young lover; and almost twenty, I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  Maybe that was the reason I was depressed.

  I was to meet Mom and Dad in the lobby of the officers’ club, a dilapidated red-brick building constructed before the First World War. Although he had left the Guar
d in 1945, Dad maintained some kind of vague relationship with the Army that gave him club privileges. I hoped we were not going to eat dinner here. I’d had enough Army food.

  They were not in the lobby when I entered. A younger couple were staring at the lake through the window at the end. No one else around. I glanced at my (inexpensive) Swiss watch. Mom and Dad were never on time; so there was no reason to expect them to be waiting for me, even if they had not seen me in twenty months.

  The orderly at the door considered me suspiciously. “This is the officers’ club, Sarge.”

  “Discharged sarge,” I said, spoiling for a fight. “I’m waiting for a member.”

  I glanced around the lobby. Where were they?

  “Maybe you’d better wait outside—”

  “Chucky.” The young woman from the window embraced me, tears pouring out of her brown eyes. “You’re so grown up, I didn’t recognize you.”

  Mom’s voice and Mom’s eyes, so it must be Mom. And the red-bearded man pumping my hand must be Dad. What the hell! I hadn’t changed, they had.

  “Same weight,” I said, “same height, still a skinny little runt with wire-brush red hair.”

  Mom held me by my shoulders at arm’s length. “Same sense of humor too, but you have changed. Oh, Chucky, we’ve missed you so!”

  The tears, embraces, and exclamations continued. I was forced to conclude that these were indeed my parents.

  But why hadn’t I recognized them?

  Because they had changed, obviously. I was the same old pint-size cynic. They had become younger. And more affluent. Much more affluent.

  Mom was wearing a fluffy and frilly light blue dress, buttons and bows I suppose, with a tight waist and a long skirt. Chic New Look. Her shoes and her hat were off-white, as were her purse and the rims of her sunglasses. She smelled of a cautious and expensive scent—hints of rare flowers—and her makeup was perfect. When I was growing up, she had almost never worn makeup. And there were a lot more curves than I remembered: she had put on some more weight since I left for Germany and no longer looked like a skinny if vaguely pretty refugee countess.