After getting off the phone, I told Karin of the plan. I was surprised that she didn’t seem interested in joining us.
“But Mick would love to see you. You must remember him well enough, don’t you?”
“Do give him my regrets.”
“He brought over that Irish mare, Lovely Morn. You used to sit on his bed in the room above the stable, he was worried your mama would find out. Don’t you remember? We all went off together to see Hitler.”
“I’ve only one day in New York, and I’m going to spend it in the shops along Fifth Avenue.”
“Shopping? Really? You’d rather?”
After the last horrid weeks in Germany, maybe the pull of those brilliant shopwindows was irresistible. We’d seen enough on our cab ride the day before to be dazzled by New York’s fabulous display of goods.
“Karin, we ought to get married here in New York, don’t you think?”
“Why?”
“The obvious reasons,” I said. “Love and devotion, etcetera. Making an honest woman of you. And getting hotel rooms will be easier.”
“We had no trouble getting this one.”
“Yes, well, not everywhere’s like New York.”
“I’ll marry you when we get to the other side,” she said.
“Of the continent, you mean?”
“Yes.”
She was still in bed when I left, sipping coffee that had cooled and reading a New York Herald-Tribune story about trainloads of Jewish children leaving Berlin and Vienna bound for foster homes in England.
I walked uptown. Mick had arranged to meet at Café Martin, on Lexington Avenue in the Seventies. There was a reservation for three, under the name McClintock.
Linen tablecloths, a French headwaiter, wine list on parchment, crystal goblets—I found the place much fancier than I’d expected or, really, could afford. I didn’t know why Mick had chosen it. An Irish bar—and there were a dozen within a short walk of the hotel—might have suited both of us better.
Probably he’d imagined an elegant French restaurant would suit Karin better, his idea of Karin.
I was sitting down when he arrived. He seemed taller than ever, filled out, even a bit jowly, but pink, vibrant, and handsome. His sandy hair was thinner. He wore a brown suit and a Brooks Brothers shirt with a rolled button-down collar. A green-and-blue-striped silk tie. On his finger a gold wedding band.
He didn’t try to hide his disappointment when I told him I was alone. He ordered manhattans for us and insisted I ring the hotel and persuade Karin to come.
“Billy, man, tell her to hop in a cab. The woman needs to eat.”
There was no answer when the hotel switchboard rang our room, and I told Mick she was out exploring the famous shops along Fifth Avenue.
He shrugged and ordered us a second round of cocktails. We looked at the menu. He chose an expensive bottle of wine. He had two children in Brooklyn, he said, both daughters, and a baby on the way. His wife, Kathleen, was from Louisburgh, county Mayo.
When first he arrived in America, he’d found work as an exercise rider at Belmont. Then for a couple of years he was head groom at a stable in the Berkshires. At last he’d been permitted to take the civil-service exam and join the New York police. He was now a patrolman attached to a precinct on the Lower East Side; also he worked two shifts each week as doorman in an apartment building on Central Park West.
We finished the bottle of French wine and shared another. I can’t remember the food, whether it was any good. I tried to describe our last weeks in Germany. Every time a customer entered the restaurant Mick looked over his shoulder as if he still hoped Karin would show up. I said she’d agreed to come out only after learning she was pregnant, and she had lost the baby on the crossing. My original idea had been to marry once we reached New York, but now I was not sure it was going to happen, even after we reached the West Coast.
“But you love the woman, Billy, do you not?” Mick said. “There’s nothing in the way of that.”
“I do. Always have. Always will. Not sure how she feels. Not sure I understand her. I know she needs me.”
“You give each other a good life and let go of old Germany. That’s my word on the subject, Billy. Welcome to America.” He raised his glass. “Slainté.”
He insisted on picking up the check. I invited him back to our hotel—we could station ourselves in the hotel bar and wait for Karin to return from her shopping expedition.
I was actually worried that in her weak, ungrounded state she might have spent far too much of our limited hoard of cash in the shops on Fifth Avenue.
Mick and I started walking south on Lexington, but at Sixty-third Street he suddenly changed his mind, saying he had to report for duty at his station house on the Lower East Side. We said a very hurried goodbye at Sixty-third and Lexington, and he disappeared down the steps of the subway entrance.
When I reached the Commodore, instead of going into the bar I took an elevator upstairs and found a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the door of our room.
Karin was in bed, wearing her nightgown. The maids hadn’t been allowed to organize things or make up the beds. Our breakfast trays were still on the floor. I realized she had never left the room.
She held out her arms and smiled. “Ah, Billy, I’ve been feeling awfully dozy.”
“No Fifth Avenue?”
“We really must watch the funds, Billy, mustn’t we? Not the time for silly shopping. How did you find your old Mick?”
“You ought to have joined us.”
“Not up for it, old man. How is Mick?”
“Married, with two little girls and a baby on the way.”
“Good for him.”
I helped her out of bed. There were small blots of blood on the bottom sheet and on her nightgown.
“We should see a doctor.”
“No, no, I’m getting better, Billy. I’m miles better. Just ring for the maid.”
“I shall run you a bath.”
“Excellent.”
After her bath she seemed in high spirits. “Let’s go to Fifth Avenue, old Billy.”
“It’s bloody cold out there, you know.”
“I don’t care.”
Wrapped up in overcoats and scarves we rode the elevator to the lobby. Lexington Avenue was hurling with fierce traffic, and the light had gone; the air was black and freezing. We walked one block, then had to turn back. It was just too cold. In the hotel bar I ordered manhattans. The barman was from Roscommon and had seven children. We had more cocktails. Then I was hungry and wanted to order us steak sandwiches from the bar menu, but she insisted everything was much too expensive, and anyway we really ought to see more of New York.
So we bundled up again and headed out to the Horn & Hardart Automat on West Fifty-seventh Street, recommended by the barman, where we had hamburger steaks for fifteen cents, slices of cherry pie for a nickel, then a long, bitter walk back to the hotel. Long before we got there she was weeping from the cold—we both were. Tears sticky on our eyelids, and yellow cabs flashing past, and the cut of the wind.
In June 1968—Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated—I was leafing through Time magazine in a dentist’s office in Toronto when I learned that the Metropolitan Museum had acquired what was left of the Weinbrenner Collection, including The Lamentation, from an Irish great-nephew of Lady Maire who’d spent decades tracking pieces down.
A few months later I was delivering an academic talk at Columbia. I skipped the faculty lunch afterward, met Mick McClintock in an Irish bar on Amsterdam Avenue, and we hopped in a cab and headed for the Cloisters, where the Weinbrenner pieces were on display.
We had stayed in touch after ’38. Exchanged Christmas cards. He’d just retired from the NYPD. He and Kathleen were about to move to Florida.
Mick had never seen The Lamentation—he had never set foot inside the main house at Walden. In the cab heading uptown I told him how my mother and Lady Maire had discovered the altarpiece. Lost on a back road on the C
astilian meseta in the blaze of summer, they had offered a ride to an old man who turned out to be a monk. The next morning he brought them to the ruined manor house where The Lamentation had been stored in a hayloft for twenty-nine years.
As we stood before it at the Cloisters, I remarked that Karin had always connected the piece with the death of the young soldier Frölisch, who died at Walden in his mother’s arms.
Afterward, strolling through the wonderful Cloisters gardens, Mick told me that Karin had come to his room above the horse stalls on his last night in Germany. They had spent the night together.
“Only talking, Billy—that’s all we did. Lay there talking about everything under the sun, but we didn’t do anything. Maybe I thought it too soon. I don’t know. Maybe I was thinking we’d have plenty of time. You see, we’d made up our minds she was coming with me to New York. It was her notion. It seemed crazy, but then I began to believe we might pull it off. Because we both wanted to so badly. You remember what she was like—the power she had.
“She slipped off to get her passport and pack a few things without disturbing the big house. I met her on the lawn. It was drizzling. She had what we used to call a train case—do you remember, girls had them, not much more than a handbag? She traveled light. Jesus, Billy, all I had meself was a grip, a ticket on the SS New York, and fifty-one dollars. She’d lifted some marks from her father’s desk.
“Whatever I was feeling then, Billy—whatever it was, I was prepared to live on it. Sure and it made no sense. It was the only time in my life, I’m telling you, that I’ve stepped out on thin air. There was no real plan. Nothing sensible. Ireland I’d left, America was coming at me like—like I don’t know what. Like a storm.”
The baron still had influence in 1927. He wouldn’t for much longer, but he did then. Mick and Karin got as far as the Hamburg-America ticket office at Bremerhafen before they were stopped by detectives. He was taken into custody, and she was put into a taxi and disappeared.
“That must have been when they sent her away to the Burghölzli,” I told him.
“The what?”
“A clinic, a sanatorium. At the University of Zurich. Lady Maire told my mother Karin had a nervous breakdown.”
“Ah, Jesus.”
Mick said he’d struggled with the detectives until he was knocked on the head and put aboard wearing handcuffs, which were not removed until the ship was under way.
He and his Kathleen had six children, three before the war, three after. He’d served in the air force. Coming home, he made sergeant in the NYPD, then lieutenant, then captain. He bought a house in Queens and another farther out on Long Island. Now they were retiring to Florida. Clearwater.
“What the hell did I ever have to offer a girl like your Karin von! A few days in Flatbush would have worn it pretty thin, I suppose.”
He stopped on the path. Grasping my arm, he spoke in a choked whisper. “We should have gone for Rotterdam, Billy, or Liverpool! I could have cashed my ticket, got us to England somehow, we could have found another ship!”
He let go my arm and brushed his cheeks with the back of his hand. “What the hell, Billy, what the hell.”
Mick flew as tail-gunner on a B-17 during the war. In March 1944 his group was on the raids that wrecked Frankfurt. It could have been his squadron, he said, even his airplane, that dropped the incendiaries that finally destroyed Walden.
But Walden had been poisoned and ruined by then, I reminded him, so it was just as well. Sometimes it is better, cleaner, when things burn right down to the ground.
Karin and I were both in better spirits in the morning. The day was even colder, but very bright, and we struck out along West Forty-second, heading for Ninth Avenue where used cars were sold, according to the barman at the Commodore.
Our fortune amounted to seven hundred dollars in American Express traveler’s checks and four hundred dollars in cash. I’d left the traveler’s checks in the hotel safe and brought along the cash.
A shining, fierce Manhattan day. Brute of American wind that only sharpened as we got nearer the river. Crossing Eighth Avenue we were nearly knocked down by a taxi. By then we were exhausted from our crosstown trek: I felt weightless, and Karin was limping—her feet were frozen numb, she said. We entered a coffee shop, sat on stools at a “counter,” and ate a hot dog each. For a nickel, as much coffee as we could swallow. Not very good coffee but hot. Her feet hurt terribly as blood rushed back in.
Up and down the cold corridor of Ninth Avenue we wandered, strings of electric lights that marked the used-car lots swaying in the howling wind. Our salesman was crude and flippant. We tried to bargain; weren’t much good at it. I paid three hundred ten dollars for a Plymouth coupe, battleship gray, 1935 model.
“A sweet machine,” the salesman kept repeating. “A very sweet machine.”
Karin named the Plymouth “Sweetie.”
Next morning, crossing the George Washington Bridge: Sweetie, get us to the other side!
That night, on the outskirts of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in a snowstorm: Sweetie, keep going!
Next day, down the slippery length of Virginia. Sweetie, don’t fail us!
The coffee shop of the Peabody Hotel, Memphis. Black waiters wearing starched white jackets served white customers. “Ich will meinen Vater,” she said, looking up from her scrambled eggs and grits. I want my father.
“I’m sorry.” I reached across the table to touch her arm.
“Ich bin fast leer.” I am just about empty.
“I’m going to get you there.”
“Wohin?” Where?
“Wherever you need to go.”
“Bring mich nach Hause.” Take me home.
When I reached Vancouver, I made a point of keeping very busy. Plenty of colleagues and customers to meet. And everyone had to take the measure of me. I found a room in a boardinghouse and a few weeks later a small apartment. Because of the difficulty of importing a vehicle into Canada, I had sold the Plymouth in Blaine, Washington, before crossing the border. But I soon acquired another car, a secondhand Buick, which I kept until after the war.
I probably put two thousand miles a month on that car at a time when most roads in western Canada were unpaved. I was an ambitious young salesman, selling chemicals by the tank-car load to paper mills and lumber mills in the remote interior of the province.
The Canadians took me for an Englishman, and being English carried a certain social prestige in Vancouver. After six months I was able to afford a larger apartment, on English Bay, with a maid. I joined a canoe club. Joined the yacht club. Developed a circle of companions who passed for friends.
Then the war came, and millions of lives broke open, mine being one. I didn’t hear from my parents after one letter via the Red Cross in 1940. I joined the Canadian army, did my officer training in Ontario, went overseas as a second lieutenant in an infantry battalion, was trained in England as a POW interrogator. Wounded in Holland, shrapnel in both legs from a German tank that blew up in a street in Nijmegen. Ended up in Germany in 1945. Saw Bergen-Belsen, saw the ruin of everything. Found my mother, still alive, in Frankfurt. My father had been caught in the center of Frankfurt during an American daylight raid in January 1944. Eilín happened to be out in the countryside that day, bartering Buck’s last pair of English shoes and some silver picture frames for potatoes. When he didn’t show up at the hotel that evening, she knew he’d been killed. Next morning she went to a temporary morgue set up in the old guardhouse, the Hauptwache, and found him laid out on the floor with a couple hundred other victims. She wanted to bury him at Walden, but the place was a Luftwaffe hospital until it burned down, and they buried only fliers there, no one else.
Buck was buried in one of the municipal cemeteries but never had a gravestone. When Eilín and I tried finding his grave after the war, we were unable to.
After 1945 the life I’d begun in Vancouver no longer made sense to me. I couldn’t believe in it anymore. I’d lost its thread. While still overseas
I’d started planning an academic career. I made up my mind to study geography and literature together. I wanted to investigate in a rigorous way the hold particular regions have on the imaginations of artists.
I enrolled as an undergraduate at McGill. There were plenty of veterans on campus, so I didn’t feel too odd or too old. Later, at Harvard, Bernie DeVoto and Stegner were among my teachers. In 1950 I was the oldest person ever awarded a Ph.D. in history by Harvard University. My dissertation, “Stolen Girls: Comanches and Baptists in Texas,” was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
I met Elizabeth in Cambridge. We are very different people, but our relationship from the start has been based on mutual respect and affection and, later, love of our children, and I think it has given us both satisfaction. The marriage certainly anchors my life. Without it, I’d probably still be out wandering el llano.
In 1945 I found myself alive on the other side of history and slowly began accumulating what I needed. Academic credentials. A profession. Marriage. A family.
Even before the war ended, my mother was hired to manage the U.S. Army Officers’ Club in Frankfurt. During that first postwar winter, when thousands were starving, she was paid in dollars and had all the food she needed. Eighteen months later she received her first Irish passport and left for Sligo, where she was able to buy her cottage on Rosses Point with funds I sent.
When I began traveling to Europe regularly for academic conferences, I always tried to add on a few extra days to visit her at Sligo, or she’d meet me in Dublin or London. She came to Rome when I was delivering a talk. After transatlantic airfares became affordable she would visit Canada every couple of years. Her grandchildren knew her well. She enjoyed excellent health right up until a few days before her death, at ninety.
Of course there really is no country of dreams that also exists outside the dreams.
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