Bliss, Remembered

by Frank Deford

  There was only very little moon and no other boats on the river at that hour, and when we got out to the middle of the river, I cut the motor and let us drift in the darkness. But just then, Teddy, at that very moment when we were dead in the water with a body hangin’ over the bow, suddenly we had a terrible bright light shining right on us. It felt like the whole world could see us. Gentry whispered, “Oh Lord,” and I just held my breath.

  In another moment I realized it was headlights from a car on the other side of the river. High beam shinin’ right at us. Bright as day, us caught red-handed with a body.

  Gentry said, “Is it the po-lice?”

  I tried to figure out where it was coming from, and then, just like that, I said, “It’s okay, it’ll go off in a second.”

  And just like that, it did.

  “How’d you know?”

  Because I’d figured out that the car must be on a little dirt road I knew that came down that way. It was where kids went to park and neck. I’d been there a time or two myself, double-dating with Carter Kincaid, though mostly fending off, rather than necking. But I knew that whatever boy was drivin’ that car wasn’t interested in anything on that river, and the instant he got to that parking spot, he was gonna turn those damn lights off as quick as you can say “Jack Robinson.” Which he did.

  So, phew, there we were back in the pitch dark again, and Gentry tied the old anchor and two cinder blocks to the body, and once we were sure they were secure, he just sort of rolled Goldstein over the bow. In a jiffy, he was beneath the waters and out of sight. Master criminals we were, Teddy. I wiped my fingerprints off the pistol, because I didn’t know whether water affected fingerprints, and I heaved that into the river, too. Then I pulled the cord on the outboard, started her up, and brought us back to the dock. It all went like clockwork.

  Where we split up, he to go over to his house, I said, “Thank you, Gentry. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

  And he started to say, “Well, Miss Trixie—”

  And I stopped him and said, “Sydney.”

  So he said, “You’re welcome, Sydney.”

  And you know, Teddy, I do not hold much with people who allude with confidence to the minds of the dead—you know, like those who take their vacation to Jamaica right after their mother dies, because, they say, “she would’ve wanted me to,” when I’m not so sure she would have. But on this occasion I felt it appropriate to say, “My father would be very appreciative for what you did for me.”

  He nodded and said, “I believe so, yes,” and then spontaneously, we came together and hugged one another, which was very unusual in those days on the Shore—a black man and white woman of any age embracing in any way. We both knew that, too, but it was just the natural thing to do, so we did it. Then he turned and headed off for home. And because of the way things worked out, that was the last time I ever laid eyes on Gentry Trappe, who was one of the finest gentleman ever of my acquaintance.

  When I got back to the house, I took a shower and put on my wrapper, and then I took my Women’s Swimming Association bathing suit and went downstairs and cut it all up. There was blood on it. Besides, I knew I wasn’t ever going to wear that bathing suit again. Even if being in the WSA had only been five or six years ago, it was a part of my life which seemed so long gone that it hardly seemed possible that that girl in the silk bathing suit had ever once been me.

  So I put all the cut-up parts into the trash and went upstairs and got in bed and thought about what I had done today and, especially, as I said already, why I had done it.

  She took another sip of the bourbon.

  Now, tell me the God’s truth, Teddy: are you ashamed of me for what I did?

  “No, Mom, I’m not the least bit ashamed of you. I’m just more amazed than ever.”

  Yeah, I told you there was one other time when I had a big neck. That day, I had a big brass one. Didn’t I, Teddy?

  I raised my glass to her in acknowledgment, and then she went right on with the very last story of the war.

  Mom and Elliott Parsons came back from Atlantic City on Sunday. They’d enjoyed the Miss America contest. If I recall, Miss Texas won.

  Naturally, though, the first thing Mom asked me was had I heard anything about Jimmy, but I bit my lip, and when she saw the tears in my eyes, she assumed that it was from worrying about him.

  Then I waited, Teddy. I just waited for Horst to call me from wherever he was. And it wasn’t only impatience on my part that made me wish he’d hurry up and contact me. See, it occurred to me that Goldstein might’ve told his wife or one of the other Nazis that he was goin’ to find me, so after a while, when they didn’t hear from him, they might very well come lookin’ for him. And although Goldstein was safely at the bottom of the Chester River, that big DeSoto of his was still parked out behind the shed, as big as day. I made up my mind that on Saturday I’d drive it somewhere—anywhere, Teddy—and abandon it.

  But, thank God, on Wednesday night, Horst called. He was in a phone booth. I could hear him dropping the coins in as the operator requested them. “Sydney,” he said, “I’m in Boston, and I’ve got an address for you.”

  I said, “Never mind.” That was a little too abrupt. He didn’t know what to say in return. So I just said, “Horst, do you love me?”

  And he said he’d already told me that, and so then, as I fought back the tears, I told him Jimmy had been killed and consequently it seemed sensible to me that we should spend the rest of our lives together.

  I don’t quite remember how he answered, because he was obviously in shock, but it was most definitely in the affirmative. So I said, “If you want to be with me, Horst, we’ll have to go somewhere new, and you’ll have to be Jimmy Branch—at least till the war’s over.”

  And I remember very distinctly then that he just said, “Okay.”

  You see, from the very first, Teddy, we always had a meeting of the minds, Horst and me.

  “Did you tell him about Goldstein?”

  Oh, good gracious, no. I never told a soul about that until I told you a few minutes ago. I just told Horst about my little adventure with the FBI, told him they’d assured me they’d get Goldstein. I understood that Horst would be a little wary—at least for the rest of the war—about the Nazis tracking him down, but the way I figured it, better he worry a little about that for a while than be burdened with the awful truth about what his wife had done for the rest of our lives. I don’t think you want to go around telling people you love that you’re a murderer.

  “Oh, Mom, please. I think you were just an instrument of the state.”

  Well, Teddy, that is a wonderful euphemism. Why, that’s like when the executioner apologized to Anne Boleyn before he chopped her head off, that it was nothing personal. I remember that. “Instrument of the state.” Hmmm. I’m very grateful for that.

  “You’re welcome to it,” I said. “But, come on, tell me: how’d you get to Montana?”

  Oh, I understood that we had to go somewhere a long ways from the Shore, somewhere where no one who’d ever known Jimmy was liable to just sorta drop in, and also somewhere where none of Goldstein’s crowd would ever find Horst. Basically, Teddy, I was inventing the witness protection program before it occurred to the government. So I just got out a map, and, in the full scheme of things, Missoula looked like the best bit of nowhere.

  Of course, first I had to explain to Mother what was up. I told her about Horst and about him defecting and me going to the FBI—and then, then I told her about Jimmy being killed. She cried quite a bit at that. She loved Jimmy. Anybody who met your father did. He was a honey of a guy.

  “That’s nice to hear, Mom.”

  Yes, and it’s the God’s truth. No girl was ever so lucky as me to have two such perfectly wonderful gentlemen love her.

  But, Teddy, the main point of me talking to Mother was to tell her that I was running off to God knows where with Horst, who was going to become Jimmy. She took this all in remarkably well, and just asked
me where I was going. I said, “East of the sun and west of the moon.” You may remember, Teddy, that the first time I danced with Horst, that was the very first song the band was playing.

  “At Joseph Goebbels’ party.”

  Yes, so that was kinda our song, and it certainly seemed apropos at the time. Later, Horst and I fell in love with a new song that fit our circumstance even better. It was song by Dame Vera Lynn—

  “I know, Mom, you wrote about it in there.” I pointed to the purple folder.

  Oh, of course. “In The Land of Begin Again,” on the other side of the hill. Yes, we went to Missoula, but we always thought it wasn’t in Montana. It was in the land of begin again.

  “How’d you get there?”

  Well, after all the fireworks of the week before, it was actually pretty prosaic. I told Mom she couldn’t tell anyone what had happened and where I’d be, and, of course, she said she had to tell Elliott, which I agreed was the natural order of things, and then I made her promise me that when she sold the place, she’d give Gentry Trappe enough to live on comfortably for the rest of his life.

  Mom said, “Well, all right, Trixie, but it’s not my intention to sell the place till after the war. Maybe you and your good-looking German can come back then when the smoke has cleared.”

  I said that was fine with me, but I knew, Teddy—I knew that once Horst and I got settled in the land of begin again, we couldn’t ever come back to the Shore. And I was right about that. As right as rain.

  So, the very next day, I packed a bag and put it in Goldstein’s DeSoto. The car was registered to someone named Kornelia Steffen, with an address I recognized as being in Yorkville, in Manhattan, which was the German section of town. I imagine she was Goldstein’s wife, or his lady friend—anyway, the one Horst had seen with him. I destroyed all that identification, and I took a screwdriver with me, and I drove up to Philadelphia. There were two main train stations in Philly, and I parked the car on the street near the one in North Philadelphia. It was residential up there, easy to park. With that screwdriver, I took off the license plates—

  “Why’d you do that, Mom?”

  Well, Teddy, when you’re trying not to leave any traces behind, your mind starts working like a thief in the night. I also left the window open and the keys in the ignition, hoping someone nefarious would have the good sense to steal it. Good riddance.

  “Did anyone steal it?”

  I don’t know, Teddy, but I do know I never heard boo from anyone about Goldstein. Maybe the FBI found Kornelia Steffen. I suppose they warned the president and Mr. Churchill about the plot, about Operation Hauptstadt. Maybe they were able to decode the papers Horst had brought over for Goldstein. I don’t know. All I know is, Horst and I had done our damndest for the United States of America, and now it was time for us to concentrate on ourselves. So we met in New York at Grand Central Station and were off to the land of begin again.

  We rented a place in Missoula, and he got a job with a bank. Once he showed them Jimmy’s “Good Citizen of The Week” citation and the letter of commendation they gave him at the Bank of Manhattan, they grabbed him. Good men were in short supply during the war, you understand. And he began to work his way up in the hierarchy, although I believe it’s au currant, Teddy, to say “up the food chain” now.

  “Yes, Mom, that puts you with the In Crowd.”

  Yes, and then you came along, Teddy. Baby makes three. We were a family. And we fit in.

  “Did Dad ever contemplate turning himself in? I mean, after the war?”

  We did talk about it. But I was the one who broached the subject, and, to tell you the truth, he simply wasn’t interested. He said he was happy being Jimmy Branch and being with me. And you. It was probably the wrong moment to even consider that, too, because that’s about when we bought our first house, and I became pregnant with Helen. It was certainly no time to change horses in midstream. After she was born, I proposed that I go back to selling insurance in town, so he could get an architectural degree, but he waved that off, too. He was doing very well at the bank, moving up—

  “—up the food chain.”

  Why, Teddy, I couldn’t’ve said that any better myself. No, honestly, I’m sure he would’ve been happier as an architect, but he learned to like banking well enough. And he was good at it. As well we all know, you don’t get everything in life. We were content. After all that had happened to separate us, your father and I were content just to be together.

  “Did he ever make any effort to find out about his family? Ever want to go back to Germany?”

  Mom shook her head.

  No. I knew he had no interest whatsoever in his sister—“the SS moll,” as he called her when she was still, however remotely, a subject of some discussion. But he had loved his parents. He was sure that both of them had just been swept along by the Nazis, that it wasn’t their natural bent at all. But he was almost curiously incurious about what might’ve happened to them. He simply said, and I remember this so very well: “Sydney, the Nazis destroyed millions of families. Let us just accept the fact that the Gerhardts were one more of those.” And that was the end of it. I never brought it up again.

  After Helen finished college and we didn’t have tuitions to worry about anymore, we took the trip to Europe. Do you remember?

  I nodded.

  It was 1970, Teddy, and we set up the usual grand tour—London, Paris, Monte Carlo, Italy. Once we got over there, I tried like the devil to get him to pop up to Berlin, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Somehow, he’d just put all that out of his mind. It was quite amazing, really, how easily he’d become Jimmy Branch. In a way, it was harder for me—at least at first—because, of course, I had known the real Jimmy Branch. I had loved him. I had married him. But in time, I didn’t think “Horst” anymore. I was able to accept it, too. Very soon, in fact, we never, ever talked about it.

  “But God, Mom, wasn’t it hard being someone else?”

  Oh, your father would hate you for being so dramatic. He was never anything but himself. Lots of people change their names. All those actors. Cary Grant was Archie Leach, but he managed just fine once he became Cary Grant, didn’t he? It’s just a name, Teddy. Didn’t your friend Shakespeare say that about roses?

  “Yes, ma’am. He allowed as how they’d be just as sweet no matter what you called ’em.”

  Well, Mr. Rose meet Mr. Gerhardt—the erstwhile Mr. Gerhardt. Trust me, the father you knew all your life was the same boy I fell in love with in 1936. It was really only his name that changed, and since no one but me—and, well, Mom and Elliott—would ever know both Jimmy Branchs, Horst was an original for everyone else who met him. He only fell out of character one time.

  “When was that?”

  The summer of ’84. Remember, I got him to take me down to the Olympics in Los Angeles, and although he didn’t care that much about swimming, he was a good sport, and we had tickets at the pool most every day. McDonald’s had built the pool.

  “Mickey D’s?”

  Yes, and a magnificent pool it was. That was their contribution to “The Movement.” That horse’s ass Avery Brundage I told you about always called the Olympics “The Movement,” like they were something sacred.

  But anyway, 1984. Now because your father didn’t follow swimming, he was quite surprised to find out that the best swimmer in the world then was a German boy named Michael Gross. He was sort of an early version of Michael Phelps, although, of course, not nearly so good. He was extremely tall, Michael Gross, and with arms so long they called him “The Albatross.”

  The first time we saw Gross win a gold medal it was in the two-hundred freestyle. He set a world record—absolutely blew all the others away. And there were all sorts of Germans there cheerin’ the Albatross on. Remember now, Teddy, the Berlin wall was still up, and Michael Gross was a West German. The ones on our side. So it really pleased your old man. Well, a couple days later, Gross was swimming in the hundred-meter butterfly, and though he was by far the best butte
rflyer in the world, it sort of took him a while to unwind that long body of his, so he was an underdog in the hundred. In the short race.

  But all these Germans—West Germans—were wavin’ flags and leadin’ cheers for the Albatross, and, in particular, there was a large group of younger ones down below us, near the pool, and shortly before the race started, your father turned to me, absolutely out of the blue, and he said, “Sydney, is it all right with you if I go down there with them?”

  Well, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather, but, of course, I said yes, and he scrambled down to be with that bunch. Remember now, Teddy, he was a man of . . . uh, let’s see, sixty-eight years then, but he was like a spring chicken for that moment. I looked down, and I couldn’t hear what they were sayin’, but I could see him chattin’ with some of the Germans, and when Michael Gross was introduced, he started whoopin’ and hollerin’ in German just like all the others.

  And Teddy, damned if Gross didn’t set another world record, comin’ up at the end and out-touchin’ the boy from the United States, who was the favorite. So the air kinda went outta the whole stadium, except for the German contingent. And no one was makin’ more of a fuss than your father, right in the middle.

  After a good while, he came back up to our seat, and you know what, Teddy: he was crying.

  “And men aren’t supposed to let women see them cry.”

  Oh my, no, your father had experienced his consciousness-raising by then, and he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. He was smiling through his tears, just beaming. And he said, “I always hoped it would be like this . . . liebchen.”

  I didn’t quite get his meaning. I said, “Whaddya mean?”

  And he said, “You know, back in ’36, I dreamed it would turn out that we Germans could be like the good people in the world. That the Olympics would show us that. That’s what I wanted.”

  And that’s when I started to cry myself, Teddy, because here it was 1984 in Los Angeles, but you know what occurred to me? You know what I thought?