He dresses, choosing a cream-colored shirt, sports coat, blue jeans, and unpolished brown shoes, an ensemble that Claire, with gentle condescension, used to call his writer's costume – even if, as she was quick to admit, she thought he looked handsome in it. It was one of their jokes. He stifles another memory of last night's pleasureless sex, of the vacant expression on Claire's face as he came, and finishes putting on his clothes. It's difficult, anyway, to remember what he would like to remember: the lights stayed off the whole time. Last week, on the phone, the editor – a man called Bentham – insisted that Paul would want to see him, but was stubbornly unforthcoming about what he had in mind. Paul imagines it must be ghostwriting, something of that sort. He stands at the bathroom mirror, playing with his collar, which, no matter how he adjusts it, doesn't conceal the dark welt on his neck. This meeting could mean work, yet he isn't looking forward to it, not because of nerves, but because conversation with a stranger, the recital of banalities, is a chore. He isn't used to it. His time is his, alone.
He surfaces in midtown, rising into the sudden crush of activity, the pageant of matching men and women, precisely dressed, who march against the wind – ties flapping, skirts pressed around knees – while jawing into mobile phones and tapping on small electronic screens. He walks quickly, crossing a square as pigeons the size of footballs waddle stupidly out of the way. There's no reason to hurry – he is in fact a little early for the meeting at Bentham's office, near the top of a forty-story tower on Madison Avenue. It looms suddenly as he turns onto the block. Stacked against the sky, such buildings reliably impress Paul, a testament to exactly the sort of ambition he does not possess: calling it greed is reductive, even though it's exactly the word he would once have used. Another of the conservative compromises of age, this lexical tempering, this revision of self. Ten o'clock. People step out for the first cigarette of the morning. Knotted in cliques of two and three, they speak in voices too low for Paul to hear.
Weekdays are strange. Fresh out of college he worked as a reporter but after three years decided that he preferred to be on his own. Since then Paul hasn't held a proper nine-to-five. His intention may once have been to chase a life that was more glamorous. He took a few stabs at writing a novel, including the one last year, but nothing ever came together in a way he liked, and before meeting Claire he left New York to do graduate study at the University of Chicago, reading for a thesis on the postwar Central European writers; it didn't pan out, and a year later he was back. With time these urges have grown small, then fallen away altogether. The life he's built for himself – modest, self-contained, and, yes, with a kind of freedom – makes the best use of his natural talents: he writes, editors solicit articles from him, and he's built a healthy catalog of bylines, even if a more enduring success has eluded him. His aspirations now have implicit boundaries. He no longer feels – if indeed he ever really did – the gnaw of ambition, that desire for greatness that constrains some men like the iron rings of a wine cask. When money gets tight he takes jobs he wouldn't otherwise – copywriting, proofreading, freelance editing – but he reminds himself that it is a small price to live without a fixed place of business and have no one to whom he must answer.
The result of his lifestyle is that, when he steps into the street in the middle of the day, he feels foreign, even a little criminal. Adults are supposed to be at work, in offices, factories, fields; he isn't.
Bentham meets him just outside the elevator. He is shorter, older, and rounder than Paul, yet projects an energy his visitor cannot match. His collar is open. Stylish, wire-rimmed eyeglasses attest to an attention to the trimmings of his profession. He bounces a look off Paul's face as they shake hands.
'I was sorry to hear about your father's health.'
'You know my father?'
'Not personally,' says Bentham. 'Word gets around.'
He ushers Paul into his office, where the smell of expensive things – leather, cologne, high-quality paper – immediately pinches his nose. Nothing wears any age. On the desk stands a menagerie of emaciated metallic sculpture, arranged to articulate unassuming elegance, an impression further embellished by the subdued abstract art that hangs on the walls. Books line the shelves, as straight and neat as good teeth.
'Close shave?'
Paul doesn't at first understand that the question refers to the abrasion on his neck. He makes a vague remark about a fall on some ice; Bentham lets it drop. Instead he compliments him on an article he recently published in New York magazine on the long gestation of the proposed Second Avenue subway line; Paul listens without offering a reply. If Bentham believes that a small dose of such attention will impress him, he's misjudged his audience. Perhaps if Paul were accustomed even to a trickle of regular acclaim these days, his appetite for the stuff would be stronger; speaking to an actual reader of his has become so rare an event that praise has acquired a peculiar, not entirely pleasing flavor.
'Have you ever thought of doing a book?'
In reply Paul makes a gesture that says, Who hasn't?
'Any ideas at the moment?'
'Do you want to hear them?'
Bentham pauses, considering his next words. He smiles at Paul, a smile that is meant to be ingratiating, and asks: 'What do they pay you, Paul? How much for a word?'
He holds a neutral expression, makes no reply.
'Professional curiosity.'
Finally, deciding there's no harm in it, Paul mentions a number.
'How would you like to make a lot more than that?'
At first Paul simply laughs. Bentham doesn't smile. He is serious. Paul has, until this moment, been baffled as to what this man could have in mind, but now wonders how he missed it. 'You want me to write about my father.'
'Yes.'
'I won't.'
'Hear me out. This would be entirely your book, to take in whatever direction you'd like. The fact is, there are a lot of readers to be reached on the memoir shelf these days. I've done a little reading about your father. We think there's a market for your story.'
'My story's nothing.'
'Your father's, I mean.'
'How do you even know about it?'
'Your brother. I've been reading the articles; one of them mentioned your father. Frank Metzger. Nothing's been written about him for decades, it seems. I looked up a few things. He had quite a life. And of course I remembered your name. You're a talented writer. Maybe you just haven't had a big enough subject.'
Paul exhales sharply. 'I'm afraid you have the wrong idea. I was born in 1969. My father wasn't anybody then. Even if I were interested . . . everything you'd want me to write about, I wouldn't be able to. I wasn't even alive.'
'No one remembers your father, and I wouldn't have heard of him if it weren't for your brother's current – predicament. But it's a unique story, a great hook. It just needs a personal angle. What makes this a viable project is what you bring to it. You're the son. You've got the name.'
'You're asking the wrong person. I've got no interest, and, even if I had, I wouldn't know where to begin.'
'Paul. This could be a big book. You'd really say no to that?'
'I'm willing to.'
'Think of it as a chance to address his critics. To tell his – to tell your side of the story.'
'I'm not sure I have a side of the story.'
That smile again: like a leopard's.
'All I'm asking is that you think about it,' the editor says. 'Forget about the money for a minute. Think of what this does for you as a writer. You don't even have an agent. With this under your belt, all of a sudden you're getting more offers for magazine work than you know what to do with. You've got a second book on the way. Just think about it. It's all history now. The dead don't complain.'
Or the nearly dead, thinks Paul. He says, 'My father thought he was being a patriot. He wanted to be more import ant than he was, and he believed he was going to change history. He was young. He was misguided.'
'Most people would use str
onger language than that.'
'I'm not trying to defend him. Look, it's difficult already, knowing the man he once was. I haven't got the slightest interest in dwelling on it any more than I already have.'
Bentham maintains an imperious detachment. He stands. Seeing him framed by the impressive office, by the material evidence of his profession and his taste, Paul feels outgunned. The refusals have done nothing to diminish Bentham's glow of assurance. One way or another, he clearly believes, Paul will see the logic of the offer.
'If you change your mind, call me,' says Bentham. 'I've even thought of a title.'
Curiosity gets the better of him; at the door he stops to look at Bentham. He waits. The editor lowers his voice.
'The American Nazi.'
In the elevator Paul feels an angry desire to expel from memory Bentham's last words. To spit them out. He hasn't got the luxury of silence and time to consider what has been asked of him, to sort through the annoyance and shame he feels. He is expected elsewhere, and quite soon – in the space of half an hour he must hurry back to the train, descend, switch lines, emerge again in Brooklyn, and then walk the several blocks to the funeral home that will manage the care of his father's body once it is beyond the help of doctors and nurses. He touches the welt on his neck, which is warm and has begun to itch. He's spoken once already with the mortician to arrange the business of his father's funeral. Questions concerning the expected number of guests proved especially difficult: there perhaps exist people of whom Paul is unaware and who have reason to come – but as far as he knows the number in attendance, besides himself, will be zero.
He walks as fast as he can. There are people to avoid, both the hard-walking businessmen and the oblivious tourists, there are trash cans, street vendors, mailboxes, parking meters. There are dog leashes stretched like trip wires, doors swinging suddenly open. Delivery boys on bicycles bounding onto the sidewalk. Lampposts and fat black garbage bags piled like dung heaps. But the mind is agile, annoyingly so, and it can perform its physical responsibilities, ushering the body through even a cluttered space while operating on other frequencies. It is the source of the will, but the will has little control over it. In direct affront to his staunch and bilious reaction to the editor, Paul, in the back of his mind, finds himself knocking together sentences and paragraphs: he is writing.
Frank Metzger, the son of German immigrants, was twenty-four when Hitler came to power. He was living by himself on the Lower East Side and working at a lawyer's office. His principal ambition was to become a poet. To date, however, that dream was more batter than cake; he thought about poetry much more than he actually wrote it. Up to this point, the story is a familiar one – an early, ill-defined wish for greatness that rattles around inside a young man.
The train arrives. Paul peruses the faces of other passengers and feels his thoughts recede. Across from him sits an elderly woman, already pushed against the back of her life – hair stretched tight by curlers, carefully dressed, somebody's grandmother. From a cavernous blue purse she pulls a thin, thumb-worn booklet titled The Lord Hears Your Cries. For twenty minutes, turning the pages with exaggerated delicacy, she recites from it, just under her breath, her lips moving rapidly, as if chewing on each word. She rarely blinks. Her eyes have a child's shine.
Prayer was once important to Paul. For his tenth or eleventh birthday, at an age when one finds tremendous joy in a plot if it offers up a good explanation of things, a friend's mother gave him a volume of children's stories from the Bible, and he was immediately receptive to the dramatic, occasionally gruesome fascination of those tales. He soon graduated to the real thing, whose dense bricks of type and obscure prose only increased its allure – a puzzle to be solved, an intellectual leap of greater, graver daring. He read, and read, and read. His eyes went sore. He was amazed at how full his head now was, at how full it had always been, and amazed that this fullness was completely private. He went warm when he thought of it. This faith was his, and he was newly free; he had found something that was not his father's, that was purely his own. Paul became a believer. He quickly adopted the habits of prayer and penitence, acclimating himself to the sudden reversals of emotion when, during a brief interlude of instinctual pleasure, guilt flew in to sting and infect it. Guilt was good because it wasn't random: it obeyed a set of principles, and with regulated, predictable behavior one could avoid it altogether.
In college Frank had studied history and philosophy, while growing increasingly intrigued by his German heritage, a fascination that dated back to the end of the Great War. His own father's emotions then had been mixed: though he loved his adopted country, the humiliation of Germany's defeat sank deep within him. Of his father's complicated emotions Frank had inherited only what his young mind could easily grasp – the disappointment.
His father's thoughts on faith were quite clear. When Paul first took up religion, Frank did not ignore the change in his son – in fact, the derision he showed was the most attentive he'd yet been as a parent. This flare-up of paternal interest declined once Frank grew bored with it, and, as a teenager, Paul put away his piety. With time it came to seem a puerile act of rebellion against a diminished, disinclined father. Faithlessness brightened within him like the lights at the end of a movie. Strangely, Paul began to recall his father's tirades almost with approbation; Frank was cruel, but he gave his son the truth. Paul came to feel slightly uncomfortable toward this younger self, and he even began to feel a sense of common cause with his father, another man who saw through the lie of belief. He would twist with mortification to remember that before going to sleep he often whispered, up into the darkness of his empty room, 'I love you.' In his life he's had little use for the tonics of therapy, but even he can see that he spoke those words to God because he had no one else to speak them to. He finally stopped because he was suffering from what later strengthened into outright embarrassment – he felt silly. As soon as he began to suspect that no one was listening, the prayers turned to salt in his mouth. His own father was miserly with affection and at times his presence barely registered – he seemed less an actual person than a concept, a climate within the house – but at least Paul knew, night after night, which room he slept in. God, it turned out, wasn't there at all.
As Hitler was consolidating his power, Frank fell in with the sons of other German immigrants and, in 1934, was introduced to some members of the German-American Bund. That summer he attended a rally at Madison Square Garden, which concentrated and gave shape to his new avocation. Within a year he was spending weekends at a camp on Long Island devoted to the glorification of the 'New Germany' and the promotion of German-American ties. It was there that he swore an oath to the Führer.
At the funeral parlor in Williamsburg an assistant greets Paul, and as she steers him through a series of corridors he can't help but notice that they avoid any brush with the reminders of mortality that must elsewhere fill the building. The weeping, the embalming, the cremation – those occupy other rooms. What he's allowed to see of the place brings to mind a dentist's office. Walls painted a stark, antiseptic white. Clean, well-lit hallways, plants standing in the corners, filing cabinets lined up and locked.
Frank rose rapidly through the hierarchy of the Bund, thrilled by the sense that he was part of something greater than himself and of something also that made him greater. He set up and ran the organization's official publication. Soon he was involved in the management of funds; one of the Bund's only material efforts in service of the Reich was to funnel American dollars into German coffers. He believed what they all believed. Germany and the United States would become partners, coequals, in a new world order; at rallies they flew the swastika alongside the stars and stripes. Frank stood at an extraordinary vantage. He was awash in the changing waters of history; when he moved, history moved with him. Here his linguistic talents served him well. His fame within the Bund soared. As a speaker of German he was mediocre, but when safely in his native tongue he was eloquent on the subject of gre
atest importance to those who gathered at Long Island: Germany as the inevitable phoenix, history's definitive and most glorious empire – the Reich of a thousand years.
As Paul enters the main office, the funeral director, whose name is Wolff, extends an arm.
'I am sorry about your father,' he says after the exchange of pleasantries. 'Rest assured, he's in good hands.'
The moment of greatest personal glory came for Frank when he took it upon himself to offer to the Nazis a special delivery of funds – his own. His father had left him a modest inheritance of three thousand dollars, which he took – in cash – to Berlin and donated to the Nazi Party. Inflation continued to erode Germany's economy; dollars were extremely valuable. He had expected a grander reception than the one he received. A bureaucrat accepted the money without emotion and made a note in a register. No handshake, no ceremony, no medal.
City of Strangers Page 4