Three
— 1 —
Wolkowicz delivered Hubbard Christopher’s ashes to the Harbor on a day in late September. Among the hemlocks the leaves of the swamp maples had already turned scarlet, and higher up the mountain some of the birches showed bright amber foliage. As the family stood in the graveyard above the house, inside the circle of headstones, there was no sound at all apart from the low moan of the wind through the woods, and that seemed to make the hush deeper. Wolkowicz had never experienced such silence, not even in the Burmese jungle with its constant hum of birds and insects. There were no prayers; Alice Hubbard had wanted to have the Order for the Burial of the Dead read by an Episcopal minister, but Paul and Elliott would not agree. Neither had ever heard Hubbard mention God.
Hubbard’s friend Sebastian Laux, a small pale banker who looked like a porcelain figurine among the gigantic Hubbard men and the plump Hubbard aunts, read some of Hubbard’s verses. A flight of crows passed overhead, cawing raucously. Turning his back to the wind, Paul opened the urn and let his father’s ashes go, a puff of gray. As they drifted away toward the blue hills their parched scent was briefly noticeable. This only lasted a moment. There were no tears; no one comforted Paul. They all walked down the hill together through the pasture and then ate lunch in the sunny dining room, laughing and telling anecdotes about Hubbard’s childhood. They did not seem to acknowledge that he was dead.
“The Hubbards are not natural mourners,” Alice explained. “Death, to them, is Hubbard heaven. When their hearts stop, they go to an eternal family reunion in the sky. Even on earth, they never get bored with each other.”
She was speaking to David Patchen, Paul’s roommate at Harvard. Patchen had been surprised by the merriment. He was a gaunt young man, as tall as the Hubbards, with a vivid scar on the left side of his face. The whole left half of his body had been damaged in the war: he had an artificial eye, his eyelid was paralyzed so that he never blinked on that side of his face, his arm was withered, his leg was lame.
As the family rose from lunch, Alice took Patchen by the hand and led him into the library. She gave him a glass of port wine and lit a fire in the fireplace.
“Do you mind being alone?” she said. “We won’t be missed, and now and again I do like talking to a non-Hubbard.” They discussed Post-Impressionist painting; this had been Alice’s passion at Vassar. “Elliott has custody of the Hubbard Cézannes,” Alice said. “Some old uncle bought them from the artist for pocket money. I’m plotting to get half of them in a divorce settlement.” With the living side of his face, Patchen smiled at the joke, but it was no joke. Alice had learned, the month before, that Elliott was sleeping with another woman. She chattered on. Patchen had never heard so many witticisms. From the next room came the plangent sound of the spinet. Wolkowicz was playing Bach again.
In his room, Paul sat by the window, reading the book of his father’s poems:
Our son was born, you know, at the instant
you took flight on the summer wind of
your imagination, carrying that chalk island
above the sun-drenched cloud tops,
lifting my bones out of the muffling earth
and putting eyes and tongue into my skull
so that I might know the splendor of your gift
(a child with your heart and face and voice).
The music that had been floating through the house ceased and Paul heard someone in the hall outside his door. Wolkowicz knocked and entered, carrying an old scratched Gladstone bag that had belonged to Hubbard.
“Your father’s things,” he said, setting the suitcase down.
Wolkowicz was ill at ease, looking around the room at the pictures. His eyes examined Zaentz’s drawing of Lori; when he saw that Paul was watching him, he looked away.
“My mother,” Paul said. He smiled. “And me.”
“You look a lot like her.”
Paul nodded. He had heard this all his life.
“Was she quiet, too?”
“Quiet? No, not at all.”
“Then you’ve got your father’s personality.”
Paul made no answer to that, but he gestured toward a chair. Wolkowicz hesitated, then sat down.
“Your friend is in pretty bad shape,” Wolkowicz said.
Paul peered at him, puzzled. He had expected him to say something about Hubbard and it took him a moment to understand. Wolkowicz touched the left side of his face, tracing the line of Patchen’s scar with a blunt forefinger.
“Oh, you mean Patchen,” Paul said.
No one else at the Harbor had mentioned Patchen’s wounds; Paul himself ignored them. But Wolkowicz had already memorized the shape of Patchen’s scars.
“What happened to him?” Wolkowicz asked.
“Grenade. I don’t know the details.”
Wolkowicz nodded briskly. The moment Paul stopped speaking, he seemed to lose interest in this subject and be ready to go on to another. This was one of the marks of Hubbard’s behavior; it seemed odd to Paul to see Wolkowicz, a stranger, using one of his father’s mannerisms.
“About your father,” Wolkowicz said. He had to clear his throat twice to get the sentence out. “Do you want to hear what happened?”
Paul nodded. Wolkowicz described Hubbard’s death—just the way in which the car ran him down. Wolkowicz left out the meeting with Horst Bülow, the gunshots, the dead German. All that was secret; even Hubbard’s son had no right to know such details.
Holding Wolkowicz’s eyes, Paul listened intently to Wolkowicz’s words. Wolkowicz saw that he didn’t look exactly like his mother after all: he had his father’s intelligence, so intense and silent that it seemed to be a danger signal.
Paul said, “You’re telling me my father’s death was a traffic accident?”
“He was hit by a car.”
“At four-thirty in the morning, in the middle of the Wilmersdorf Wood?”
Paul, still staring into Wolkowicz’s eyes, would not break off his glance. This scrutiny made Wolkowicz uncomfortable; he made no effort to conceal this. He held up his hand, as if to ward off more questions.
“That’s all I have to tell you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Wolkowicz got to his feet. “I have to be going,” he said. “There’s a train to New York at four o’clock.”
“Are you going back to Berlin?”
“No, I’m through in Berlin.” Wolkowicz did not offer to explain further.
“Wait,” Paul said. He heaved his father’s heavy bag onto the bed and opened it. It contained no clothes, just Hubbard’s reading glasses and wallet and his steel watch and wedding ring, and a thick package. Hoping that the package contained a manuscript, his father’s last work, Paul ripped it open. There was no manuscript inside. The package was full of blurry photographs of concentration camp prisoners.
In each picture, a ring was drawn around the unrecognizable head of a woman. All the women were fair and small. Paul spread the photographs out on the bed. He gave Wolkowicz a puzzled look. Wolkowicz looked uncomfortable again, and once more he had to clear his throat before he could speak.
“He kept hoping he’d find your mother,” Wolkowicz said. “He studied pictures from the camps and sometimes he’d find a woman who might be her. The same physical type, about the same size and age. People changed a lot in the camps. Still, he thought he might recognize her.”
“But he never did?”
“No.”
“He never found any trace of her at all—no file that mentioned her, no witness?”
“Your father never talked to you about this?”
“No, not about this part of it. He believed that my mother was alive. Did he find any trace, anything at all?”
“No,” Wolkowicz said. “A lot of pictures, but no proof.”
Wolkowicz said nothing about the file Hubbard had seen on the last day of his life. For all practical purposes, there was no file; it couldn’t be completed. Horst Bülow, living in terror in East Berli
n, would never obtain the missing pages, if missing pages had survived.
Paul studied him with Hubbard’s calm, intelligent gaze.
“It wasn’t a reasonable thing, Paul,” Wolkowicz said, “to think there might be hope. It was sad, being with your father when he wouldn’t give up hope. I’m sorry.”
Wolkowicz gripped Paul’s hand, a painful pressure. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know,” he said, “but your father was a great man. I’ll never owe any man more than I owe him. If I can ever do anything for you, and I mean anything, just tell me. Elliott will know how to find me.”
There were tears in Wolkowicz’s eyes, the only tears that anyone had shed for Hubbard that day.
— 2 —
Before he returned to college, Paul went to New York. He found Zaentz in Greenwich Village and gave him the photographs Hubbard had collected. Opening the package, Zaentz recoiled.
“What are these, for God’s sake?”
Paul explained.
“Why bring them to me?”
“You knew my mother’s face better than anyone.”
“I?”
“You drew her from memory after fifteen years. If anyone can recognize her face, if it’s in those photographs, you can.”
Zaentz spent the afternoon by the high window of his studio, an aging man with gleaming white hair, looking at the photographs again and again. Finally he stacked them together neatly and took off his steel-rimmed spectacles, unhooking the wire bows from his ears. He spoke to Paul in a low voice, in English.
“No,” Zaentz said. “These women are not your mother. Your father is dead, Paul. You should let this obsession about your mother die too.”
— 3 —
A week after Hubbard’s funeral, Sebastian Laux came to Boston to see Paul. Paul thought that Sebastian wanted to discuss his father’s will with him. He had been the family’s banker and now, as trustee under the will, he had custody of Hubbard’s estate.
In his suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Sebastian looked out the window onto the English Gardens.
“This is only the second time I’ve been to this city,” he said. “It’s just as I remembered it—a nice little park, lots of brick, and absolutely no sign of life. You must be very glad this is your last semester at . . . college.” Sebastian, a Yale man, did not like to speak the word Harvard.
A waiter brought hot water and Sebastian made green tea, stirring it energetically with a bamboo whisk. As a young man, before the war, Sebastian had spent a year in Japan and ever since he had carried Japanese tea and Japanese tea bowls with him wherever he traveled. According to Elliott, Sebastian had brewed green tea for them behind the German lines in France, where they had been together, fighting with the Maquis.
He watched Paul drink the bitter tea. “Maybe you’d prefer something else?” he said.
“No, this is fine,” Paul said.
Holding his bowl in both his tiny hands, Sebastian sipped his tea, inhaling a big gulp of air to cool each mouthful of liquid. During Paul’s boyhood visits to the Harbor, Sebastian had explained that this vulgar noise was considered good manners in Japan. Paul had not seen him since those days, though Sebastian’s bank, D. & D. Laux & Co., had paid his tuition bills and sent him his allowance when he was at school.
Sebastian had already told Paul that his father had left his entire estate to Lori. Paul would inherit if he petitioned the courts to declare his mother dead. This Paul had refused to do.
Sebastian finished his tea. “I suppose you still want to leave things as they are with your father’s will,” he said.
“Yes.”
“The cash value of the estate, as of today, is $78,587.56,” Sebastian said. “That may be a smaller sum than you imagined. Your father and mother gave a lot of money away before the war, almost their entire capital.”
“They gave it away? How much?”
“Just over a quarter of a million dollars. I was always sending drafts to people with odd names in Copenhagen. I suppose they were the ones you and your parents smuggled out of Germany on that sailboat.”
Paul, hiding a smile, looked into his tea bowl. He seemed pleased at the thought of Hubbard and Lori squandering his inheritance. This didn’t surprise Sebastian. He had been handling the family’s financial affairs for a quarter of a century and he didn’t think it was possible to explain the way money worked to anyone who had a drop of Hubbard blood in his veins. Both Elliott Hubbard and Hubbard Christopher had always taken pleasure in giving money away—Elliott to his legion of girls and friends, Hubbard to terrified refugees. The cousins were not spendthrifts. They just seemed to find money slightly comical, like sex—one of the things in life it was impossible to understand and useless to resist.
“It isn’t a bad idea to leave the money where it is,” Sebastian said. “You ought to be able to earn your own living, and in time the balance will grow.”
“Is there enough for my Aunt Hilde to live on?”
Paul’s question was the first real sign of interest he had shown in this subject.
“Your father was quite specific about Aunt Hilde,” Sebastian said. “We’ve been making quarterly transfers to Berlin from the interest. Their banks are operating again; things are getting back to normal with the Germans.”
Paul nodded and looked around the room. He seemed ready to change the subject. So was Sebastian: he had not come to Boston to talk about money to Paul Christopher. Yet he didn’t quite know how to start the conversation he wanted to have with him.
Gathering his thoughts, Sebastian went to the window and looked down again on the English Gardens. In the deepening twilight, crowds of people were streaming through the gates of the park. Sebastian had keen eyesight, and even from this distance he noticed that there was something odd about the Bostonians. With a small thrill of satisfaction, he realized what it was—they looked alike; most of them had Irish faces.
“Did you know, Paul,” Sebastian asked, “exactly what it was your father was doing in Berlin?”
“What he did, Sebastian? Of course.”
“He told you? I don’t mean his writing.”
“He was a spy. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t need to. It was obvious.”
Sebastian lifted his eyebrows, then chuckled. “I suppose it was. Nevertheless, your father was extremely good at the work. When he died, he was chief of American intelligence in Berlin.” Sebastian paused. “I used the word died,” he said. “But you do realize that he was murdered?”
Hearing this, Paul did not move or speak; he simply continued to listen, waiting for Sebastian to go on. Sebastian searched Paul’s face for some sign of surprise, for some flash of anger or hatred. Like Wolkowicz before him, he saw only the calm, sad intelligence he had witnessed so often in Hubbard’s face. Finally, Paul asked a question.
“Why are you the one to tell me this, Sebastian?”
“Elliott couldn’t bring himself to do it. I’m . . . trusted by the men your father worked with. I knew them in the war.”
“Do they know who did it?”
“In a general way,” Sebastian said. “It was the opposition.”
“The Russians? Why would they do it?”
“One never knows the answer to that question, not the exact answer. I gather they had a lot of respect for him; he was too good at his work. They feared him.”
“Was it really as simple as that? As stupid as that?”
Sebastian thought the question over carefully. “Yes,” he replied. “Very probably.”
— 4 —
The next day, Sebastian and Paul went down to Washington together. The Outfit was giving Hubbard a posthumous medal; that was why Sebastian had been sent to tell him that his father had been murdered. Hubbard’s colleagues wanted Paul to accept his father’s decoration. On the train, Sebastian gave Paul a slip of paper to sign. It was a promise never to reveal what Sebastian had told him; it asked him to promise, too, never to reveal that he had attended the ceremony.
&nb
sp; “It may seem strange to you, to decorate a man in secret, after he’s dead, but those are the rules,” Sebastian said.
Paul signed the secrecy agreement.
In Washington, Sebastian led him down a dim corridor past rows of tall polished doors. Sebastian opened one of them and they walked across an empty anteroom into a paneled conference room. Prints of square-rigged sailing ships decorated the walls. A little group of men stood by the window, talking. Among them was Elliott Hubbard, who hurried across the room to greet Paul. Behind him, at the edge of the group, stood Wolkowicz. At his side was a remarkably pretty blond girl. She smiled brilliantly at Paul, as if he were an old friend for whom she had been waiting.
Elliott led Paul to the window and introduced them to the other men. Wolkowicz waited, hanging back, until this was over. Then, in his clumsy way, he stepped forward and shook hands.
“My wife, Ilse,” Wolkowicz said.
Ilse shook hands and repeated her smile. She wore white gloves. Paul was astonished that Wolkowicz should have married a girl who looked like this. Ilse read the surprise on his face but made not the slightest acknowledgment.
“I knew your father very well, so I know what you have lost,” she said in German, squeezing his hand. “You have my sympathy.”
Elliott touched Paul’s arm. “I think they want to begin,” he said. He and Paul joined the others. Except for Wolkowicz, who wore a brown gabardine suit, all the men were dressed alike, in well-pressed dark suits with vests and striped ties. Their shirts were very fresh, as if they had changed them specially for the ceremony.
The ceremony was brief. Wolkowicz and Paul Christopher stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the Director, while an aide read a citation. It was a description of Wolkowicz’s actions on the morning of Hubbard Christopher’s death. In this way, standing at attention in a room full of strangers, Paul learned the full, bloody circumstances of his father’s death.
The Director hung a medal around Wolkowicz’s neck and gave him a sympathetic look, as if he, rather than Paul, were the bereaved son. “It wasn’t your fault we lost him, lad,” he said.
The Last Supper Page 17