The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  He shrugs again, and I press my foot against the accelerator.

  Colin waits in the car while I tiptoe inside. My father is asleep. Downstairs in my room I throw things into a backpack. Underwear, a couple of shirts. Upstairs I look around the living room. Summer is almost over, and my father and I have begun to pack up the house. We are moving out soon, into a condo.

  All week we have been on our hands and knees, sorting through the bookshelves, the trunks and closets. We are having an estate sale, and a woman comes each morning to help us. She has little stickers for everything. A pile of my mother’s purses sits in one corner, her collection of Yves Saint Laurent dresses, her stacks of archived Gourmet magazines.

  It’s no coincidence that I want to run away.

  In the kitchen I grab a bottle of red wine from the counter and a bottle of those little blue pills my father gives me when I can’t sleep. I hurry. I am afraid that Colin will change his mind.

  Or that I will.

  He is still in the car when I return, leaning back against the headrest, his eyes closed. We drive all through the rest of the night, taking turns at the wheel. It is dawn when we reach New Orleans, that rare time in the city when the streets are empty. Dew glistens on the French balconies, strings of beads lie in the gutters.

  Colin drives us to a hotel in the French Quarter, and I wait, bleary-eyed, as he parks the car, checks us in. Our room has a balcony overlooking Bourbon Street. I grab the bottle of wine from my backpack, open the doors to the morning air. Colin takes the two tumblers from beside the coffee maker and joins me at the wrought-iron table outside. He opens the bottle carefully, pours two glasses.

  Light is breaking across the rooftops, and for the rest of my life I will never forget the way that glass of red wine tasted. I take gentle sips, breathing in the warm glow of the sun glancing off the buildings around us. I am afraid to look at Colin. I cannot believe what we have done.

  It’s not that we’ve run away to New Orleans in the middle of the night. It’s that we’ve fallen in love.

  Chapter Eleven

  1999, I’M TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD.

  I AM SITTING IN the mayor’s office in the small town of Troubky, in the Czech Republic. My father is on my left, and Michael, our translator and guide, sits to my right. Five minutes ago we were shown into the room by a secretary, and now we are waiting anxiously for the mayor to appear.

  We arrived in Prague almost a week ago—I flew in from New York and my father from Southern California. This trip came together only a few weeks ago, my father calling me late one night with the idea.

  Want to take a little trip with me?

  Sure, where?

  I half paid attention as I listened to him. I had just gotten home from my bartending job and was distractedly taking off my coat, unwinding my scarf and emptying the contents of the school bag that I’d been carrying around all day.

  The Czech Republic.

  I stopped what I was doing, allowing myself to fully tune in to what my dad was saying.

  The Czech Republic?

  Sure. Why not?

  Why not was mostly because my father would turn eighty in a few months and his health has been deteriorating by the day. This would, in fact, be his last trip anywhere, something I think we both already knew.

  I didn’t have to ask why he wanted to go. For the last few years, ever since the availability of the Internet, my father has been obsessively researching his World War II past. He has uncovered information about his missing crew members and even been in communication with European war historians, trading back and forth obscure puzzle pieces making up the air wars that took place in December 1944.

  One such historian, a man named Michael, in Prague, has been a major player in my father’s quest to unearth just such information. They have been exchanging e-mail for months.

  Michael thinks I should visit, my dad said. He’s come up with some eyewitnesses and other people for me to meet with.

  It sounds like an adventure, I said.

  I’ve usually listened to my father’s reports of his World War II findings with halfhearted interest. It’s not that I don’t care—it’s more that I’ve never really been able to really connect with World War II.

  Even the name World War II immediately dredges forth an image of dusty history textbooks and painfully boring descriptions of military operations. I’ve listened to my father’s stories for my whole life, and they’ve always seemed like just that: stories. Compared with my bright, shiny New York City life, something like World War II never even seemed real.

  Until now.

  Sitting here, in the mayor’s office of this small town, all of that has changed. My father’s past has been brought to life, and it’s more interesting than I could have ever imagined.

  MY FATHER WAS twenty years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He was a sophomore at Michigan State, studying engineering and going on double dates with his best friend, Bernie. When the reports of what happened in Pearl Harbor blasted out through the speakers of the radio, my father dropped everything and enlisted in the war that very afternoon.

  My father wasn’t necessarily handsome, but he was deeply intelligent, with an inherent sense of mischief—both attractive qualities. He was brave too, even though he had no reason to be. I think it was those very traits that got him assigned to the Army Air Corps. He immediately began training to fly B-24 Liberators, huge, gleaming bomber planes. Although he’d never even been on an airplane, he instantly loved everything about flying.

  By December 1944 he’d been stationed in Italy for several months carrying out one bombing mission after another. The name of my father’s plane was Arsenic and Lace, and a scantily clad woman graced its nose. Like most B-24s, it was flown by a crew of ten men: Arthur Carlson, Vrooman Francisco, Milton Klarsfeld, Edwin Howard, David Brewer, Abraham Abramson, Clifton Stewart, Morris Goldman, John Modrovsky, and my father, Gerald Smith.

  By that winter they were finally getting good at their jobs, these guys. Former kids from bland Midwestern towns, they had grown up a lot in the last months; they walked with a new sense of pride. They were flying airplanes, dropping bombs. They were saving the world.

  On December 17, 1944, they were scheduled to conduct their biggest mission yet—the entire 765th Bomb Squadron, a flock of about thirty airplanes, was sent out from its base camp in Italy, to put an end to the Odertal oil refinery in Germany, in hopes of wiping out Hitler’s most productive remaining fuel sources.

  They weren’t the only ones on a big mission that day. The Luftwaffe fighter command sent out a fierce squadron to stop them. Only one side would win that day, and it wouldn’t be the Americans.

  My father’s squadron never even reached the refinery. In fact December 17 would go down as the day of one of the deadliest air battles in all World War II, with only one B-24 Liberator out of the whole group managing to survive the intense Luftwaffe attack and return to base.

  The rest of the planes, my father’s included, were shot to pieces in the air over the Czech countryside.

  My father was forced to bail out of his bullet-ridden airplane when half of his crew was killed instantly. He stepped over the bodies of Art Carlson and Morris Goldman, and made a quick decision that the only way he was going to survive was if he jumped out through the burning doors of the bomb bay. My father dislocated his shoulder and hit his head during that jump, knocking himself unconscious. When he came to, he was falling through the sky. He pulled the rip cord on his parachute immediately and floated slowly to the snowy ground below.

  He landed in a field outside the Czech town of Olomouc and was taken to an inn by a group of townspeople. Only hours later a group of German soldiers barreled through the town, whisking my father and all the other fallen airmen off to a prison camp on the icy lip of the Baltic Sea.

  My father would remain in that prison camp for the next six months. He would discover four of his crewmen in its barracks. He would subsist on bread made of sawdust and, at one poi
nt, an old, dead horse that the German soldiers dragged into the prison yard.

  In early May 1945, six months after my father was shot down, Hitler committed suicide and the war ended. The German soldiers fled as soon as they heard, and my father, along with several other men, riffled through the prison offices. He found his prisoner file and took it home as a souvenir. In the mug shot that is included with the file my father looks impossibly young, his mouth a hard, angry line.

  My father returned to Michigan, to a wife he barely knew and a son who had been born while he was imprisoned. He would go on to live a long life, traveling the world, becoming a successful engineer, and marrying several times over. But for five decades he would carry with him many questions that would go unanswered until our trip to the Czech Republic.

  Finding the answers to these kinds of questions is a feat that few veterans have ever been afforded, but my father had always been lucky.

  THE FIRST NIGHT in Prague we meet Michael in a loud bar downtown, and we spend the evening at a back table, huddled over maps and fresh pints of beer. My father acts boyish and excited, but I feel protective of him and a gnawing concern churns in my abdomen.

  Michael is in his thirties. He is smart but nerdy, and when he met us at the airport he was wearing a leather bomber jacket covered in old air force patches, much to my father’s delight. Michael is thrilled that we are here and he has brought along a historian friend of his who works at the newspaper. Michael pulls a sheaf of research papers from his bag, rattling in his warbling Czech accent about all the places he wants to go in the next two weeks, and the people he wants to talk to.

  Michael does not realize my father’s limitations. Rather, he sees a walking hero, a veritable history book come to life, and he can’t wait to set out with him.

  Michael does not see what I do: my incredibly fragile, overly exerted, only remaining parent.

  I don’t know how we are going to make it through these next two weeks. I haven’t seen my father in four months, and he looks worse than ever. He has lost weight and takes long minutes to pause after simple things like getting out of a taxi or walking across the floor of a restaurant.

  I keep quiet though. As feeble as he has become, I have also never seen him so excited. He runs his finger over a map of the Czech countryside, and Michael leans in close.

  This has to be it, my father says. This has to be where I landed when the plane was shot down.

  I take a sip of my beer and it dimly begins to dawn on me just what a big deal all of this is.

  I’ve been doing some calculations, my father says, and he begins to break them down. I am in awe, reminded of just how smart he is. I am also reminded of all the times my dad ever tried to help me with math, and how much I hated it.

  My father continues, moving his hand over the map.

  Allowing for a descent rate of thirteen feet per second from an altitude of twenty-six thousand feet, the time of descent would be about two thousand seconds, or a little more than thirty minutes.

  My father is talking quickly, Michael nodding along.

  The stated wind at twenty-six thousand feet was fifty-two nautical miles per hour from 260 degrees, slightly south of due west. The wind at ground level, as I recall, was negligible. Using an average wind velocity of twenty-six statute miles per hour, I would have drifted to the east and a bit north in my chute for approximately thirteen statute miles.

  Our formation had been on a northwesterly heading from a point about twenty miles east of Bratislava, en route to the next turning point near Uničov. That flight path passed about ten miles west of Olomouc. If I bailed out after passing Olomouc but before reaching Uničov, then my parachute landing should be north of Olomouc near Šternberk and Road No. 46.

  Well, that’s where we’ll go, Michael says.

  AFTER A MORNING spent sightseeing in Prague, we rent a little Fiat and set out for Olomouc.

  The Czech countryside is peaceful, with verdant fields and old farmhouses. I tune out the conversation in the front seat, between my father and Michael; lean my head against the back window; and let my gaze wash over the unfamiliar landscape.

  I think about my life back in New York. From this distance, it’s so much easier to see it for what it is.

  I’ve been in Manhattan for a year, living with Colin in the East Village, working at Republic, and going to the New School. Even with all of these things in place, it still feels like something is missing.

  I am twenty years old, but I feel ancient.

  Every day, on my way to school, I walk through a little park between a pair of apartment buildings on First Avenue. Several old women gather daily on the same benches, speaking in some undecipherable European language, their words clipped and polished like stones hitting water.

  Every time I see them I make a silent wish to trade places with one of them. I want to skip past all the years of sadness I have ahead of me. I want to be at the end of it all, looking back. I wish I were done already.

  I can’t stop missing my mother. I can’t stop worrying about how much time I have left with my father. Most of all I can’t stop thinking that my life has been interrupted, that this is not the way it’s supposed to be.

  The only things that ever give a lift to my days are my writing class and the books I disappear into. The rest of my time is spent trudging from class to work to home again. Crying because I can’t find a cab. Crying because I am drunk. Crying because I miss my mother. Crying because I feel trapped in my relationship with Colin.

  My dad calls almost every night from California. He is lonely too. And sad. But here, on this trip, I realize how important this adventure is to him, how much meaning it gives his life.

  Michael suddenly pulls over to the side of the road to consult the map, and I am shaken out of my reverie. We are almost to the city of Olomouc and they are buzzing with energy. Michael’s friend has written a story in the newspaper about my father’s visit and has put out a call for eyewitnesses from that time. Several have come forth, and we are on our way to meet them.

  An hour later I am standing on a grassy hill overlooking a vast green field. In the distance is an old cemetery where the remnants of my father’s plane crashed to the ground. We are looking at the answer to one of his long-held questions. My father scans the landscape, tears in his eyes, remembering that day fifty-five years ago.

  Michael stands with an elderly man and woman, and I walk over to join them, wanting to give my father space to take this experience in. I smile at the woman. She is tiny but wearing so much clothing that it is difficult to tell her weight. She smiles up at me in return, and I try to imagine the ten-year-old girl she was five decades ago.

  She was standing right here when she saw the pieces of the plane come down, Michael translates, pointing to the edge of the field.

  She describes what it had been like to be a girl, what it had been like to see these planes fall from the sky. She describes how scared she was, how sad it made her to see all these young men dying. My father listens quietly, and I know that I will never fully understand what this moment is like for him.

  The man, a doctor now, had also been about ten years old when he watched my father’s plane crash from this hill. If there was any question as to these people having actually witnessed my father’s plane crash, the doctor describes finding a heavy flashlight with the name Regan stenciled on the side.

  Regan was the ground chief who worked on the plane between missions, my father tells him.

  The doctor guides us down the street to a corner lot where, until recently, there had stood a neighborhood pub. He describes how the nose turret of Arsenic and Lace had come down right through the roof of the building, half-penetrating the ceiling. He had seen the turret hanging there over the beer taps. The body of David Brewer, one of my father’s crewmen, came to rest not far from the bar.

  Before we part ways the old woman presses a little gift into my hand: a miniature, hand-painted ceramic vase. It is wrapped in plastic and tied with
a crumpled ribbon. I hug her good-bye and watch as she climbs onto a bus that will take her back to her home, over an hour from here.