The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told

by Dikkon Eberhart

  My best pal, Steve, had given me a cherry bomb. This was very cool. Our brownstone in Georgetown had a deck off my bedroom, which was on the second floor at the back. From the deck, I could look down onto our garden.

  When Steve gave me the cherry bomb, I had an inspiration. That night, I would light the bomb in my bedroom, stroll onto the deck, and toss the thing into the garden, just to see what would happen. It was a great plan, and I was excited. The trouble with my plan was that I didn’t know anything about fuses.

  Late that night, while sitting on my bed, I lit the fuse. It burned extremely fast. Before I could even think—to say nothing of taking my leisurely stroll—the fuse was almost gone. Panicked, I jumped up and threw the cherry bomb toward the open deck door.

  BANG!

  Seconds later, my bedroom door slammed open. My enraged father, in pajamas, charged into the room. The room reeked of gunpowder.

  “What was that? Did you do that?”

  “No.”

  Wham!

  My father hit me across the face with the back of his hand so hard that I staggered and fell back onto the bed.

  “Don’t you EVER lie to me again!” Slam of the door. He was gone.

  I never did.

  I cannot remember a single instant when I loved Dad more deeply or more profoundly than I did at that moment.

  The thing was . . . Dad never hit; he was a poet. Mom? Now and then, when Gretchen or I needed it: on the tush, with the back of a hair brush; but Dad—never.

  Granted, Dad probably would not have hit me had I not wakened him from a deep sleep and scared him half to death. Normally, he would have sat down on my bed and psychoanalyzed me. But what I needed in that moment was the alpha father, and I got him. Like many other young males, I was a cocky kid who needed to be struck down, just as we humans, I am sure, must seem now and then to God to be cocky kids—so totally certain in our self-admiration, so dismissive of the consequence of our sin, needing now and then to be struck down.

  Where had this cockiness come from in me? Earlier in my life it had not occurred to me to challenge my father. Yes, I might be naughty—but lie? To lie is to challenge. It was clear to my addled brain that lying was disrespect, yet I did it anyway. I got away with disrespect, until the cherry bomb.

  Looking back on it now, I perceive that Dad honored me just then. I know he loved my testosterone-flushed psyche for what glories and agonies it foreshadowed for me, about which he knew and I did not yet.

  His son was becoming a man!

  As the son in a literary family, I met Oedipus early. Before puberty, I didn’t understand the sleeping with my mother part, but the murdering of my father part—huh! That was appalling enough, and yet authentic enough, to make me shiver. Not Dad, of course; certainly not! But there was about that Oedipus story an awe—this was mythmaking with a punch!—and it caused my insides to roil.

  Hearing of it talked about, I encountered something primitive inside of me, something whose fetid breath made me gag. Some stupefying Beast lurked just behind the jolly facade of my Eberhart antics. That Beast tightened my throat, and it tightened another part of me of which I had recently become more aware, a part whose hot tightness I liked.

  Panting through my mouth, sometimes with a little drool, I would go out quickly into the woods by myself and shoot action figures off of rocks with my gun. It was only a BB gun at that time . . . but still. I hoped to hurt those figures. When I picked them up afterward, I enjoyed seeing the dents.

  I knew this pressure in my gut was what happened to Dad sometimes, and that his way to relieve its explosiveness was not to shoot but to create. It was elemental between us, this visceral knowledge I had of Dad’s need, and of his will, to create. When pressure was intense in him, something new must be made to happen. Random words must become “The Groundhog.” Tension in the house between Dad and Mom must become, by his charm, soothing laughter instead.

  But as a youngster I knew, also, that the need to create could go wrong. A bad poem might come instead, whose music—as it were—was discordant clang.

  If God, while intending Adam, should have created Satan instead, it would not have been a righteous creation; it would have been a clang. My father created me, molded me, and taught me, and once—when I needed it—he slapped me down. As he forced me forward, sometimes he slipped in his effort, and instead of making music, his effort went awry, and there was a clang.

  I hated those clangs, but the effort of the men behind me—that is, of my father, and of his father, and of his father, all the way back to Eberhart the Noble sitting on his throne in Stuttgart in the scarcely imaginable thirteenth century—that effort, too, tensed me up.

  And more to this: Eberhart the Noble had a father, who had a father, who had a father, who eventually was our very first father—our very first father, Adam himself, who was pushed into existence—fearfully and wonderfully made—by the very breath of God.

  Dad let his pressure out by creating with his words, but I fell flat when I burst; I made nothing new: dead action figures, yes, but so what? Hair was growing on my chest. I could make a big bang by punching a door, but I had no words of my own. When later I became an actor, the words I said were just words from Shakespeare, Chekhov, Bolt, Ibsen, Albee, Miller, and Brecht.

  Dad—that robber—had already used up all the words.

  In the meantime, on the night of the cherry bomb, when I needed it much, Dad showed me the Lion Father and the backside of its paw.

  A particular way Dad honored my testosterone-flushed psyche was to protect the icons of my young maleness against my mother’s occasional attempts to clear them away. Living in Washington and being deemed old enough to make my way, alone, around the city by bus, I often went to public buildings after school. The FBI was a special target. I took the FBI tour so many times that some of the agents began to know me. The best part of the tour was what happened at its end. For then we descended into the basement to the firing range. There the agents fired their weapons for us at paper targets with life-size human silhouettes. The best of this good time was the last demonstration—the tommy guns. I loved those tommy guns then—and still do today.

  There’s nothing like a tommy gun to shred a target, especially if you have learned how to restrict its muzzle from moving up and to the right.

  Since I was known by some of the tour guides, now and then they would retrieve the targets, riddled with bullet holes, and present them to me as souvenirs. I posted these grisly trophies on my bedroom wall. In my aesthetic view, they perfectly complemented my single most important objet d’art.

  At the head of my bed I had enshrined a large poster of Sophia Loren. She was wet and angry, but she was the absolute perfection of womanhood nonetheless. Now and then, Mom would bemoan my man-cave decorations, but although she got her decorative way in most of the house, Dad held firm on his determination that I should command my own private walls.

  Despite my gratitude to Dad for his support, I was plain angry at him too. Case in point: it was a rule of our house that I must wear a sport coat for nightly dinner at our dining table. As a young teenager, my fury at the injustice of this stupid rule seethed within me. Can you believe it, not one single one of my pals was tyrannized in this way!

  One night I arrived with no jacket, and a fierce row occurred between Dad and me. In the end, I was banished to my room. Now, I was a strapping guy, and my anger was so powerful that I smacked my fist through the door of my bedroom, cracking its solidity with a single blow.

  Silence from downstairs.

  What must I do to make him grapple with my rage—kill somebody?

  “I am at war with you!” I shouted. “At war!”

  What Dad did about my shattering fury was to be Dad. “Ah, youth,” he glowed the next day and patted me on the back. “What energy! What purity of emotion! What muscles! Hurrah!”

  This made it worse.

  If he wanted to defuse his emotions by poetizing them, then fine. But he had no right to
defuse mine.

  Mine belonged to me!

  A few months later, Dad taught me something about the difference between anger and hate. As a poet, his teachings were oblique. As his son who loved him and who sought to catch up with his meaning, even in poetry, I listened hard. Sometimes his oblique teachings worked. And once, I got the back of his hand—which also worked.

  Dad and I were sitting on Reve’s afterdeck at anchor off Pond Island, several miles seaward from Undercliff. Everyone else was ashore—the women, the dogs, the children—enjoying the picnic. I was a man, so I had stayed aboard while Dad smoked a pipe, and I had coiled down all the lines in the hope he might notice.

  Dad wore his long-billed fisherman’s cap, a discouraged sweater, ratty khakis rolled to his knees, and sneakers with no socks. His World War II German binoculars hung around his neck. Lieutenant Commander (retired) Richard Eberhart, United States Poet Laureate, serving at the pleasure of President Eisenhower, himself a former military man, gazed over the placidness of East Penobscot Bay, and growled.

  “It took us a long time to learn how to hate.”

  He was speaking about the war, a rare event. I was profoundly still, not to break the spell. I was hungry, you see; I was famished for truth.

  “We are not of the hating kind. We were angry, oh, yes. That was easy. It was easy to be angry. But the Germans,” he said, “they were better than we were, better soldiers. We respected the Germans—after all, Goethe, Beethoven. The Japanese were just a horde. We hated them first. It took us longer to hate the Germans, but we did it, finally.” He looked elsewhere. “You don’t go to war out of anger.”

  There was a long silence.

  Then he looked back at me.

  “You go to war out of hate.”

  He knocked the ash of his pipe overboard against the gunwale. “And we are not of the hating kind,” he repeated, still looking at me. “We are not of the hating kind.”

  By that time in my life, I knew my father’s war poems more deeply than by heart—by soul perhaps. I was beginning to understand their passionate plea that God explain and not hide his ineffableness behind an indifferent and especially not behind an ironical cloud. I was beginning to understand their anguish at the snuffing out of the lives of the young machine gunners my father tutored. I was beginning to understand their horror at the seductive beauty of tracer rounds—designed otherwise to kill—as they arched elegantly and silently at a distance and under a slender moon.

  Calm now, when it was just Dad and me, and on the sea where I was masterful and at home, Dad was for me at that moment an adored and a supreme amalgam. He was a poet of Blakean fire; an aggressive and razor-edged intellect; a ruminator who burrowed down into the muck and found there a jewel and tossed it—with fanciful élan—into heaven.

  And he was also a naval man who knew despair over a list of names whose faces he could not recall, but they had gone to early deaths, who defended their nation with machine guns on navy bombers, and whose marksmanship was my father’s responsibility.

  My father stood. “Enough about hate. Let’s join the ladies ashore.”

  “But what happened then?”

  Dad looked a question. “Then?”

  “Then. When we learned to hate. What happened then?”

  “Then we won.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A funny moment of international literary contrast occurred one time when the famed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was visiting the United States and came to our Washington house for drinks and dinner. This was during the period of the so-called “Khrushchev thaw,” after the Soviet premier had denounced Stalin, visited Beijing, and then come to visit President Eisenhower in our country.

  Yevtushenko managed to tread a fine line between denunciation of past Soviet crimes against humanity and acceptable approbation of Communism. As a consequence, he was allowed to travel internationally more than many Russian writers, and Dad was his host in Washington.

  Before Yevtushenko arrived at our house, I remember one of those exasperating arguments resulting from Mom’s sense of humor and Dad’s sense of decorum.

  Mom wanted to invite James Angleton to the dinner as well. Like many of Mom and Dad’s acquaintances, Angleton was a poet, which is how their friendship had begun. He would come around from time to time for a drink and to talk poetry with Dad and to joke with Mom, who shared his sense of humor. What ignited this particular argument, however, was not the fact that Angleton was a fellow poet but that he was chief of counterintelligence for the CIA.

  Just imagine the scene!

  “Betty, I forbid it.”

  “But, Richie, it would be such fun!”

  “No. Absolutely not. How could you even think of such a thing?”

  “I want to hear what Jim says about the party afterward. Wouldn’t you just love to know?”

  “No, I would not love to know, and it’s absurd to think about it.”

  “Oh, pooh,” and Mom stomped back to the kitchen.

  Maybe Dad was right. Maybe it was better that Jim not be present. Yevtushenko was accompanied everywhere he went (and I mean everywhere, into each room) by a commissar whose function it was to make certain that the exuberant poet didn’t defect or otherwise embarrass the dignity of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  The humorlessness of this Soviet functionary was ludicrous to my mother, who I’m sure would have loved to nudge Jim about it and to share a wink. The man was a lump in a shiny, plastic-appearing suit, and he glowered in the corners of our living room and dining room and smoked incessantly—not American cigarettes, though they were far tastier than his Russian ones, as my mother pointed out to him when she offered him a pack.

  But Mom was always able to see the other side; that was the key to her humor. Though the commissar was ludicrous, at the same time, he touched Mom’s heart. After the party was over, she expressed her sympathy for him. The poor man, she surmised, must have been witheringly, even agonizingly, ill at ease in our capitalist and degenerate household, where people just chatted and laughed and enjoyed life for its beneficence.

  All during dinner, Mom tried to make the commissar bend. My mother was a fan of the Greta Garbo movie Ninotchka, and she thought that there must be a way to get the commissar interested (figuratively—for those of you who have seen the movie) in a new hat. But the man’s spine was of cold steel. None of Mom’s humorous blandishments made the slightest impact on the rigor of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  The person who was most deeply affected by the dinner, however, was my father. I remember Dad and Yevtushenko making a production of signing and exchanging copies of their poetry books for one another. Dad, whose books were selling decently at that time, asked Yevtushenko how many copies of this particular book he had sold in Russia. His response: about three million.

  Dad was stunned—three million?

  For months afterward, Dad extolled his new friends, the Russians, for their poetic sensitivity. What a people they were, the Russians! Ah, the Russian soul! How magnificent that millions—millions!—of Russians read poetry as they mucked their fields and pulled their turnips! But then someone suggested to Dad that those millions of Russians might just have been told to buy the book, or else.

  That deflated Dad, which made him particularly vulnerable to the next Russian crisis. Not long after the Yevtushenko dinner, a box showed up in the mail at Dad’s Library of Congress office. It was a brown-paper parcel about the size of two loaves of bread. The wrapping was dirty and ripped. There was no return address other than something incomprehensible, written in Russian.

  Dad checked. The box did not tick.

  But Dad was alarmed. Perhaps something had been said at the Yevtushenko dinner that had offended the USSR. If so, the package might be a bomb. No, it did not tick, but things in the assassination business were probably more sophisticated by now.

  What should Dad do? Maybe he should call someone at the FBI. Or Jim! “Maybe I should call Jim,” Dad suggest
ed. Jim would know what to do.

  However, the next day, with calmer heads prevailing (particularly Mom’s), Dad very gingerly snipped at the paper until it peeled away. Only when Dad saw what was inside the package did he remember that another of his new Russian friends, the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, had promised to send Dad a boxed set of his novel And Quiet Flows the Don, for which, a few years later, he would win the Nobel Prize.

  Afterward, it would sometimes hurt Dad’s feelings when Mom would tell the story of the Russian package that was maybe a bomb.

  “Why should anyone want to bomb Richie? He’s just a poet.”

  “Just a poet? Just a poet? We poets used to be the principal advisers of kings!”

  Mom could see that she had hurt Dad’s feelings, so she stopped telling the story that way.

  Of course, Mom was a wife. Many wives have a loving instinct to defend their husbands against possible disappointment by making certain their husbands are grounded in reality. (My wife, Channa, is another such wife.) In Dad’s case, for example, when a new poem was turned down by some editor, and he was distraught, Mom would try to ground him by saying, “Richie, you think every word that drips from your pen is immortal. Well, it isn’t.” Sometimes this statement would relieve Dad’s tension, but more often it would not.

  These events occurred in the early 1960s. Ten or twelve years before then, when—headily—the war was over and all things seemed good with the world, several major poets poured out verse dramas. As Dad said, they were remembering ancient Greek drama and its impact on Athenian civil society five hundred years before Christ. Then, the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides truly shaped how the public thought.

  Dad wrote verse drama too. He and two friends even founded the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which still exists—more or less under its original mandate—to this day. Dad did not possess the playwriting excellence of T. S. Eliot or of Dad’s friend Archibald MacLeish. But his motivation was the same: How shall we shape postwar society? One of the excitements of being United States Poet Laureate was that the title seemed to confer a shaping voice.