The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  With barely a glance at the still-familiar menu, he ordered a schnitzel and, after a moment’s hesitation in which he debated whether a drink at noon might undo him, a bottle of Dinkelacker.

  It wasn’t just the weather, which grew more somber by the hour. He didn’t like being the only customer in the Heidelberg; he felt scrutinized, even accused. Seldom did he so long to find himself amid a noisy, gregarious crowd, one that might keep a cook safely occupied in the kitchen, behind those swinging doors through which Ilse-Marie had just carried his order. He dreaded gruff, blustery Wolfgang’s inevitable emergence from back there. For years, a tattered billboard on the side of the old brick pharmacy down the street had sported that jovial, cleaver-wielding likeness: The Wurst Butcher on the Block. And as if on cue, Wolfgang did emerge, his hair sorely thinning, his face gone thick and gray with age. He’d had cancer surgery, Louis remembered.

  “Wie geht’s, wie geht’s?” Wolfgang wanted to know. He slid into the booth opposite. His hands were big and powerful, his nails scrubbed clean.

  “Nickt so schlimm,” Louis told him. “It’s good to see you looking so well.”

  “Getting too fat and too lazy,” Wolfgang lamented. He gestured around the empty room. “I got nothing to do all day. Maybe I should retire. But you want to know a secret?” He leaned conspiratorially close. “It would kill me to see the Schwartzen take this place over. When I first opened here…”

  It occurred to Louis that he’d have perhaps been better off skipping lunch entirely and heading straight to the cemetery. He should have grabbed a bite with Tracy in the school cafeteria, his presence gently reassuring the young man that, all minor qualms aside, everything had really gone quite splendidly in the morning class.

  Or better yet, why hadn’t he thought, in the interests of investing his colleague further in the institution for which he toiled so diligently, to ask Tracy to accompany him as he paid his respects? Several times now the young man had seemed curious about the Forge School’s past, its venerable traditions, its ineffable ethos. Well, it was too late now for that. Another time.

  Fortunately, through the Heidelberg’s front door burst a party of five, hectic young men in suits, lawyers probably, or insurance men, since those were the only two businesses left on Main Street that employed young white men in suits.

  “Got to go,” Wolfgang said apologetically. Louis had the feeling they had been on the verge of a more complicated conversation than he had the nerves for. He was apologetic in return as Wolfgang shook his hand (he’d forgotten how powerfully that hand engulfed one’s own). “It’s awfully good to see you. I’ll try to stop in more often.” He wished his tone of voice didn’t so clearly betray him at such moments.

  “Ja, ja,” Wolfgang told him. “I know why you’re here today.”

  If that was so, he was doubly relieved that a longer conversation had been averted. He had to admit, sadly, that, although he continued faithfully to go through the motions of grief, the real grief had long since dwindled to little more than a benumbed whisper inside him.

  “Thank you,” he told Wolfgang sincerely, “for remembering.”

  As Ilse-Marie set a rather drab-looking plate of schnitzel before him, he could only admire her own lack of desperation. It was clear: in another year the Heidelberg would be gone. Was this how the Germans had soldiered on, against impossible odds, in the final days of the war? As a boy he had followed the newspaper and radio reports as the Allies from the west and the Soviets from the east closed the noose around Berlin. To watch that magisterial city, great dove-gray prince of Europe’s heartland, battered and burning in the final throes of its Götterdämmerung, raised him to a fever pitch of vengeful excitement that was nonetheless shot through with a heart-stopping and entirely traitorous grief. He was fourteen. At night he lay in bed with his shameful secret. He had given himself over to the enemy’s spell. His were, at least in theory, the loose lips that sank ships, his the hands that gave aid and comfort to the ravening scourge. In the quiet of his soul he had mouthed certain words he knew to be terrible, bitter words: Luftwaffe. Wehrmacht. Blitzkrieg. How had that happened? A stirring novella read at an impressionable age, some concerts sponsored by the Germania Association of Poughkeepsie, a waiter at the Mountain Brauhaus in the Shawangunks, a veritable Siegfried, blond and bronzed, who had caught his imagination one evening as he dined with his parents, long before he had reached the age when he might be expected to be attuned to such things, and whose image had burned for days like a votive candle lit at the altar of a cult scarcely to be named. It was a mystery as awful as the changes happening to his body, the regrettable habits he had, against all his self-respect and restraint, recently indulged himself in under the covers at night.

  But it did not quite end there. In the victorious summer of defeat that followed, during which all eyes turned to the Pacific (to whose fate he was entirely indifferent), Louis had worked his first job. At the Mohonk Mountain House, that grand and rambling resort, fantasia of wood and stone and mossy shingles, he operated the ancient elevator that deposited guests on their appropriate floors. Among the visitors sojourning there for two weeks in August, while atomic bombs fell on Japanese cities, a certain mild-eyed, distinguished gentleman compelled his attention. Day after day he ferried this man, his wife, and his grown daughter to and from their third-floor suite. They were Germans, Louis had deduced from their conversation; refugees, no doubt. They exuded a curious mix of pride, courtesy, and warmth that Louis found attractive but mysterious. The man in particular, with his clipped mustache and austere black-rimmed spectacles, his thinning gray hair and habitual bow tie, seemed at once weary and prodigiously alert. Like a king who has renounced his throne, he allowed himself to be led by his wife and daughter, and yet it was he, clearly, who remained royalty. Who were they? In the elevator’s confines, Louis was acutely conscious of a gaze resting on him momentarily, then drifting away only to return, in the briefest of glances, several times during their short ride. Something stirred in him; he had never felt so scrutinized, seen through, calmly disassembled. And yet at the time, despite his quiet young sense of outrage at the liberties this gaze took with him, the impression overtook him that, along with everything else, some strange homage was somehow being paid the lowly elevator boy who dutifully guided the machine to a soft stop at the third floor. But how could that be? Only on the morning of the German family’s departure did Louis learn the strange truth: none other than the famous writer Thomas Mann had, for the last weeks, graced the resort with his presence. The uncanny coincidence shivered down Louis’s spine. The war had ended. Germany had been laid low in defeat. He knew that Thomas Mann had fled that benighted country, that he had become a vociferous opponent of the evil he saw there; still, Louis couldn’t help but mysteriously conflate the author of the classic novella that had so stirred his soul when he’d read it earlier that year with a noble enemy whose capacity for evil, as the great writer himself knew all too well, was so strangely and fatefully linked to its capacity for good.

  The Heidelberg’s schnitzel proved completely tasteless, even after he squeezed wedges of lemon along its leathery flank, and in any event, he didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. Seeing Ilse-Marie busy with her lively tableful of lawyers, he folded a twenty under his half-empty mug and, slipping quickly and unobtrusively into his overcoat, slipped equally quickly and unobtrusively out the door.

  Business had almost completely abandoned Main Street. That had been a camera store; and there, where barbaric grafitti adorned the boarded-up windows, Valley Stationery; and past that, the old Lenape Grocery with its wooden floors and wooden Indian. They’d all been open that afternoon he walked down this street fifteen years ago, an interlude of glorious Indian summer, temperatures in the eighties, the world so vivid with late autumn color it seemed ready to jump out of its skin. One moment he was basking in all that, and the next, sudden as a flash flood in a narrow canyon, a cold surge flowed down the street. Never in his life had he felt a
nything so peculiar. Within ten minutes the day’s character had changed utterly. Clouds engulfed the sun; a chill rain began to fall.

  It was later that evening that a knock came at the door. Outside, he could see a police cruiser parked against the curb. The shy young officer held his hat in his hand. The rain had brought down all the bright leaves. “I’m afraid I have some tragic news,” the officer explained.

  How he hated the way everyone misused that word, tragic. So very few things were, technically speaking, tragic. The thought prevented him from entirely grasping what the officer told him.

  The cold front had borne down from Canada, picking up moisture over the Great Lakes. After a long dry spell, rainwater mixed with the residue of oil on a road’s asphalt surface to form a film, a treacherous slick. It had happened earlier in the afternoon, up in Sullivan County. Jack had been driving back from his farm. Behind him, Louis felt Claire put her hands on his shoulder.

  The cemetery lay on the north side of the Reformed Dutch Church, whose sober bluestone facade dominated Middle Forge’s commons. Ancient locust trees, now barely more than hulks, rose bare-branched from amid gravestones on whose worn faces the name Emmerich was a strongly recurrent theme; Jack’s forebears had come to the Hudson Valley nearly three centuries ago.

  At a pay phone on the corner, two young black men took turns talking. Louis noted them just as a precaution. Their gestures looked languid and playful, but a sixth sense hinted at the casual inclination toward violence lying just below their easy laughter.

  “Let me stand at your verge, Chasm, and not be dismayed.” Louis spoke the old words quietly. He scattered them as if they were flowers. With those mystical lines Jack had introduced him, so many years ago, to the Secret Germany he had already, as a boy, intuited. His first year at the Forge School, they’d sat late into the night sipping kirsch or Jaegermeister, and Jack would read aloud to him from the austere and voluptuous hymns of Stefan George, or they would listen in silence to Schubert and Wagner and Bruckner. Afterward they would talk—wonderful talk, grave and ardent and idealistic. Those nights had been, in a sense, Louis’s real education, a legacy carefully passed his way.

  One night, listening to Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, those somber variations composed after the Allied bombing of the composer’s beloved Munich Opera House, Jack had broached, almost hesitantly, the terrible heart of the matter, observing, “It is entirely possible that what we witnessed in those years was the triumph of a morally good but utterly banal culture over a terribly compromised and corrupt but vastly more beautiful one.” Jack’s words had made Louis vividly remember, of all things, Betty Grable—those legs, those buttocks, that pert and fetching glance over the shoulder. WIN IT FOR ME, BOYS! she called out invitingly from propaganda posters impossible to ignore. At fourteen, he had nursed his skepticism in silence. There was a war on, and who if not Betty was helping the cause? But all the while he had dreamed, in his solitude and darkness, of the Secret Germany no Betty Grable would ever sully.

  It was as if a covert signal had passed that evening between the headmaster and his newly hired teacher. Something in Louis quickened. They were comrades in a secret war to save those grave and beautiful things worth saving from the irrepressible vulgarity that had, as Stefan George had darkly declared, trampled down every inch of earth from equator to pole. They both had known, without ever needing explicitly to say it, that that secret and noble war was what the work of the Forge School, in its obscure way, was all about.

  Along the empty street an old woman trundled a shopping cart loaded with soda cans. The two young black men, Louis noticed, appraised her as well. But she was tough as a root, an ancient inviolable turtle. They could see, in a glance, there was nothing there for them. He, on the other hand—old white man in a tweed jacket and overcoat, umbrella in hand and still thinking of Betty Grable, of the bombing of the Munich Opera House, of Jack Emmerich, who had never married—he was without doubt the more plausible victim. For the moment, though, tethered to the phone booth, his potential assailants remained at a safe distance; he would leave if they started to walk toward him.

  Had Jack been lonely in his bachelorhood? The school was his life, he’d always said, the education of boys, and Louis had never had cause to doubt the absolute truth of that claim. That had been in the days before people asked questions of every innocent thing, before this relentless need to name, to label, to categorize. People had understood that life might be rich, complicated, ambiguous. And about Jacks life, especially as seen from the perspective of nearly two decades, there had undoubtedly been rich and complex ambiguities, the specifics unknowable from this distance and yet, paradoxically, from this distance clearer than they had been up close.

  Reid, for one, had had his moments of wry speculation—Jack’s overnight camping trips at Indian Rock with his favorite students, gossip easily dismissable—but then Reid had never fully appreciated the scope of Jack Emmerich, his vision and ambition. Father Fallone might well be the Forge School’s reigning genius, but there were musics he had long ago shown he simply could not hear. But perhaps, for all concerned, that was just as well. Certainly it had averted some misunderstandings of a personal nature that might have occurred had he been more—how should one put it?—finely attuned.

  In his head the long descending figure from the Metamorphosen sounded grievingly. Was there any piece of music more profoundly sad? What is gone, it said with no trace of consolation, is simply gone. The tombstone spelled it out so bluntly. 1921–1980. LET ME MOUNT TO YOUR HEIGHT, SUMMIT, YET NOT BE DESTROYED!

  The black men had finished their drug deal, or whatever tricky negotiation they had been undertaking on the phone. They stood alert, as if casting about for what to do next. As for himself, there was nothing more to be done here. He had paid his respects. He had honored his dead. Teacher, fallen comrade, old friend. He was not about to offer himself up.

  Ruined for the afternoon, too restless or distraught in heart and head to accomplish anything, he should have simply called it a day, gone home early. But something warned him of the dangers of falling into that habit. The slippery slope was everywhere.

  He would take a walk instead. After three in the afternoon the school’s center of gravity shifted. Irving and Cooper, the two classroom buildings, emptied out, the boys dispersed to the gym or the playing fields for athletics or to remedial sessions with their academic tutors. When classes were in session he purposely avoided wandering through those halls unless he had specific business; he worried it might look as if he were on the prowl, spying and keeping tabs, which was the farthest thing from his mind.

  The empty classrooms had a calming effect on him. He enjoyed imagining what went on there, the work that was accomplished. Each room had its own personality: in one, maps showing Greece in ancient times were pulled down over the blackboards. In another, where Robertson taught biology, carefully tended cactuses covered the south-facing windowsills. Thornhill’s math classroom was hung with complex and beautiful geodesic models she’d had her students design and make.

  The door to Tracy’s classroom was ajar, and he was intrigued to see Tracy at his desk. Perhaps he was marking papers. The sight of a young man busily at work stirred something in Louis. Glad for this fortuitous chance to encourage him once more about the morning’s class, Louis rapped lightly on the door frame.

  He stopped midway through the door. Tracy was at his desk, to be sure, but he was not alone. Quite casually, hands in his pockets, one leg dangling, Noah Lathrop sat on the edge of the desk.

  They both looked up at him—not with alarm, but certainly with mild surprise.

  “Louis,” Tracy said.

  “Hey, Dr. Tremper,” Noah echoed. “We were just talking about that class you were at today.”

  A harmless bit of information, exactly the kind the headmaster might be expected to want to hear. He’d volunteered it, though, just a little too quickly. There was something about this picture Louis didn’t like. But what that co
uld be, other than the fact of their both being here at this particular hour, when the classrooms were generally deserted, he didn’t rightly know. And what, for that matter, was he himself doing here?

  “Please don’t let me interrupt,” he managed to say, even while observing to himself some ease they had with each other, some intangible level of comfort, nothing in particular he could put his finger on. Then, thinking back to the tensions, even the hostility that had been so palpable between them in the classroom, at least on Noah’s part, he felt profoundly confused.

  “He’s all yours,” Noah said, with what Louis supposed passed for a smile from him. “I’m gonna go now. Bye, Mr. Tremper. See you later, Trace.”

  Louis turned to watch him slouch toward the door. A sudden, unprofessional impulse shamed him. There was no evading it. He never took sides against students, but toward Noah he felt a visceral antipathy. His last-minute application had been a catalog of difficulties, both scholastic and social. A more accident-prone youngster Louis thought he’d never seen. An arm, a leg, a collarbone: half his young life, it seemed, had been spent mending one bone or another. Louis could never shake the suspicion that some people, whether consciously or not, called the storm to themselves.

  In the end, he had yielded to the wisdom of the admissions officer. Noah’s father, after all, was a man of far-reaching power and influence, and such men were usually exceedingly grateful when their sons effected the impressive turnaround the Forge School promised and, more often than not, delivered.

  Louis decided he would say nothing more about the subject to Tracy. He’d had his say. And about first names, too.

  Tracy, meanwhile, was smiling bemusedly and shaking his head. “So, I’m all yours now,” he said. Then, gesturing toward the window, the quad across which they could both see Noah making his way, “I see it’s really starting to come down out there.”