My father had learned to swim as a child in Lake Ellyn, a man-made lake that was actually a large retaining pond in the South End, dug to keep the Kindle River from overflowing its banks in wet seasons. His parents apparently liked the water, too, because there are many photos of the whole family in the ridiculously full bathing costumes of that era, cavorting at the lake, or in the Garfield Baths, a giant teeming indoor swimming pool which was a favorite diversion for Kindle County's working families until the baths' role as a polio breeding ground led them to be closed in the 1950s.
Watching my father swim was always mesmerizing to me. His grace in the water, and the carefree way he splashed around, was inconsistent with the guy who existed on dry land. And so was the physique revealed in his bathing suit. He was a fair-sized person, five foot eleven, and while not exactly Charles Atlas, pretty muscular. Whenever I saw the solid body concealed beneath the shirt and tie he wore until he went to bed each night, I was amazed. So this was who was here. I felt simultaneously reassured and baffled.
Eventually, when I was around fourteen, my father, never much for boasting, admitted in response to my questions that he had been the Tri-Cities high-school champion in the hundred-yard backstroke. Even then, I was hungry for any morsel about who he was, and so one day when my duties on The Argonaut, the high-school paper, required me to visit the U High Athletic Association, I decided to look in the archives to see if I could find my father's name.
I did. Sort of. The backstroke champion of 1933 had been called not 'David Dubin,' but 'David Dubinsky.' I knew, of course, that immigrants of all kinds had Americanized their names. Cohens had become Coles. Wawzenskis had become Walters. But it did not sit well with me that he had made this alteration just before starting on his scholarship at Easton College, that gentile bastion. It was a bitter hypocrisy to disown your past and, worse, a capitulation to the happy American melting pot that had marginalized many citizens, especially those with darker skin, whom it could not fit into the blender. When I discovered that Dad had talked his parents into following this example, so he wouldn't be undermined in his new identity, I couldn't keep myself from confronting him.
He defended himself in his usual fashion, with few words. "It seemed simpler then," he said.
"I am not hiding my heritage," I told my father. "However you felt, I'm not ashamed." This was a fairly cheap shot. In our home, my mother had insisted on Jewish ritual and Jewish education. There was a Sabbath meal on Friday night, Hebrew school, and even a quaint form of kosher in her kitchen, in which traife of all kinds; including the ham sandwiches she loved, could be consumed, but only if they were served on paper plates and stored on a single, designated shelf in the Frigidaire. Dad had never seemed adept with any of that, probably because he had absolutely no religious training in his own home, but on the other hand, I never doubted that my mother had his full support. Nonetheless, in my final year of college, in 1970, I did my father one better and legally changed my name back. I have been known as Stewart Dubinsky ever since.
Nature, of course, has this way of getting even. Daughter Number 1, since the age of six, has told me she hates Dubinsky (which first-grade meanies turned into Toop-insky') and has vowed to take the last name of whomever she marries, even if it's Bozo A. Clown. And I didn't do my father much worse than he'd done his own dad. My grandfather, the cobbler, was in his last years when I made the change, and actually seemed pleased. But as I labored throughout 2003 to recover what my father had never seen fit to share, there was always a little sore spot in my heart whenever I recalled how I had shunned the one thing of my father's I'd had.
This, then, was the story I told Bear Leach immediately after first meeting him in the front sitting room of Northumberland Manor. Bear extracted the complete tale with adroit questioning and accepted my rueful second thoughts about the change with a sage smile.
"Well, Stewart," he said, "I sometimes think that's everything that goes wrong between parents and children. What's rejected. And what's withheld."
In the latter column I could count my father's manuscript, which I eventually thought to ask Leach about. At that point, I assumed Dad had carried through on his threat to burn it. When I said as much, Leach struggled to his left and right, muttering until he located a Redweld he'd rested against the chrome spokes of his wheelchair. Inside the expandable folder he handed over was at least an inch and a half of jumbled papers, but thumbing through them I instantly recognized my father's lovely cursive hand on several interlineations. Big goof that I am, I sat there on the little love seat where I was perched and cried.
I'd read every line by the time I returned home, finishing by spending three hours in the Tri-Cities Airport after stepping off my plane, unable to endure even the thirty-minute drive to my town house before reaching the culmination. I was a sight, I'm sure, an economy-size fiftysomething guy bawling his eyes out in an empty passenger lounge, while travelers on the concourse cast worried glances, even while they went on hustling toward their gates.
The day Bear had given the typescript to me, I eventually asked how he had ended up with it.
"I have to say, Stewart, that I've always regarded my possession of this do. Cument as the product of ambiguous intentions. As I told you, your father said he was intent on burning it after my reading, and once I finished, I felt strongly that would be a terrible loss. I held on to the manuscript for that reason, claiming that I needed it in order to clarify little matters connected to his appeals. Then in late July 1945 your father was released quite unexpectedly and left Regensburg in haste, with other things on his mind. I expected to hear from him about the document eventually, but I never did, not in Europe, and not when we returned to the U. S. I thought of looking him up from time to time over the years, especially as I moved the manuscript from office to office, but I concluded that your father had made a choice he deemed best for all of us, and certainly for himself, that he go on with his life without the complications and memories our renewed contact would raise. The typescript has been in storage at the Connecticut Supreme Court among my papers for several years now, with a note informing my executors to locate David Dubin or his heirs for instructions on what to do with it. I was quite pleased to hear from you, naturally, since it saved my grandchildren from making that hunt."
"But why burn it?" I asked. "Because of this stuff about murdering Martin?"
"Well, of course that was my suspicion, at least at first." Bear stopped then, something clearly nagging him, perhaps a thought about how close he was to the boundaries of what he could properly disclose. "I suppose all I can say for certain, Stewart, is what David told me."
"Which was?"
"Oddly, we never had a direct conversation, your father and I, about what he had written. Even once I'd read it, he was clearly disinclined to discuss the events he'd described, and I understood. The closest we came was a day or two after the sentencing. Your father was going to remain under house arrest during the pendency of his appeal, but he was beginning to accommodate himself to the idea of five years at hard labor. I told him what criminal lawyers always tell their clients in this predicament, that there was going to be another day, a life afterward, and that he might look back on all of this, years from now, with different eyes. And in that connection I brought up the manuscript, which at the moment I'd conveniently left in the safety of my new office in Frankfurt.
"`I think you should save it, Dubin,' I said to him. `If nothing else, it will be of great interest to your children. Surely, you can't pretend, Dubin, you wrote something like this just for me. And certainly not to reduce it all to ashes.' He pondered that, long enough that I thought I'd struck a chord, but in the end he stiffened his chin and gave his head a resolute shake. And at that point, Stewart, he gave me the only explanation I ever heard about his determination to destroy what he'd put on paper.
"My most desperate hope,' he said, Is that my children never hear this story.
November 16, 1944, still in Nancy Dearest Grace-
Sorry for the silence. As you can tell from the news reports, the troops are on the move again, and the pace of our work has picked up, too. There are battlefront incidents that by their nature are often urgent, and we know that the move to a new HQ may not be far off. Our hope is that it will be in Germany-better yet, Berlin.
I'm feeling more myself now than when I last wrote. You must be wondering about those letters I dashed off a couple of weeks ago, bracketing my little detour into "action." With the distance of time, I have decided to put the entire experience behind me. That is what the old soldiers tell you to do: take the past as gone, and realize the chasm between war and normal life is wider than the Grand Canyon and not to be crossed. Darling, believe me, one day when this thing is over, I want you sitting beside me, so I can stroke your hair while I think over some of this. But please don't mind if it turns out that there's not much I care to say.
On a happier note, your most recent package, no. 15, arrived today. Only two of the sugar cookies were in pieces and I enjoyed them that way, too, believe me. Even better was the bottle of Arrid you sent, which I know is in short supply and thus made nie the envy of many. Because of the lack of fuel, hot water is a rarity, meaning few showers and baths. Let your brother know how much I appreciated the deodorant. Say what you like, but sometimes it is an advantage having your own department store. On that score, I'd like to request a favor. If George sees any film pack, size of 620, I'll take whatever he can find. My sergeant, Biddy, is quite the photographer and is having trouble getting film. He's probably the best fellow I've met in the service and I'd love to help him out.
Winter has come. The weather has gone from dank to bone-chilling. It is still raining, at least in name, but what falls now are icy pellets that sting the skin and freeze solid within hours. I wear my woolen gloves when I am sitting at my desk, although the courtroom has a little heat. The cycles of rain and ice are far worse for the boys in the foxholes. Trench foot has become a plague. Estimates are that a third of the troops are suffering from it, many with cases so severe they have to be hospitalized. Patton has ordered 85,000 extra pairs of socks and is rumored to have lectured troops that in war, foot hygiene is more important than brushing your teeth. Overshoes are coveted. The boys out there continue to amaze me with their courage and determination.
Their hardships are at great remove from me, as I continue with the safe but dreary life of a lawyer in court. I do have one piece of news. My promotion came through yesterday (only four months overdue). I am now Captain Dubin, with the word "acting" removed from my title as Assistant Staff Judge Advocate. I put on my silver bars immediately and walked around all day feeling great satisfaction every time a lieutenant saluted as I passed.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, my love. I expect to be with you, by the fire, this time next year.
I love you and think of you always, David
One afternoon in the second week in December a clerk dropped my mail call on my desk, three letters and a card. I was stuffing them inside my tunic, to be savored in privacy later, when the postcard grabbed my attention. On one side was a black-and-white photo of a gabled structure, with narrow variegated spires and two concentric arches over the door. The tiny legend on the reverse identified the building as the synagogue at Arlon, the oldest in Belgium. But I was more astonished by the handwritten note there.
.
Dubin-
Am sorry we fool you. Robert says was no choice. You is good fellow. Please not to think bad of me. Perhaps we meet again when is not war. For Jew is ok to say Joyeux Noel?
G.
.
Gita Lodz's handwriting was pointed and not particularly tidy, just as I might have guessed. She had used English, knowing that a message in French might be months getting past the Army censors.
I read the postcard perhaps twenty times in the next day, trying to determine if it had any larger meanings. Why did she bother? Did I actually care? Eventually I began to wonder whether she was truly in Belgium or if this was another ruse, designed by Martin. I asked a postal clerk if he could tell the mailing location of the card, which bore the purple circled stamp of the Army post office. A three-number code at the center was from the First Army Headquarters near Spa, Belgium.
After pondering, I sent a teletype to Teedle's headquarters at the i8th Armored Division, stating that I'd had a communication indicating where Martin might be. By now, the i8th had returned to combat, moving past Metz into Luxembourg where they were skirmishing with the Germans as they fell back toward the heavy concrete fortifications of the Siegfried line, ringing Germany. With the approval of General staff, only days after Martin had disappeared, Teedle had issued an order for Martin's arrest, bringing a formal end to my investigation. Thus relieved, 1 had been doing my best not to think about either Robert Martin or Gita Lodz, both of whom had misled me to my serious detriment. On my hangdog visit to Teedle the day Martin had decamped, I'd gotten the hiding I expected, but not simply for losing track of the Major. Patton was incensed about the explosions at La Saline Royale, and in Teedle's words, wanted "Martin's balls for Thanksgiving dinner." The raid on the dump had been planned by OSS in the fall, but, as it turned out, no one had given Martin permission to proceed now Apparently, it was an adventure he just couldn't stand to miss before absconding. Without coordination, it proved a tactical disaster. The Germans' 2,1st Panzer Division had been spooked by the massive fireball and curtailed its advance on the region near Marsal, unwittingly avoiding three American antitank battalions Patton had had lying in wait.
My message to Teedle brought a quick response. Late the same day, I was hauled out of court for an urgent phone call. Dashing upstairs, I found Billy Bonner on the other end. Teedle was apparently in range of an Antrac phone relay and wanted to talk to me personally. The sound quality on the field telephone was static-scratched and thin, and when Bonner went to get the General, the thunder of artillery resounded down the line.
"I have your goddamn teletype, Dubin," said Teedle without preliminaries, "and it's too fucking lawyerly, as usual. I need some details in order to contact VIII Corps. What kind of communication was it you received?"
"A card, sir."
"A postcard? The son of a bitch sent you a postcard? Who does he think he is, Zorro?"
"It was from the girl, sir."
His girl?"
"Yes, although I don't think she's really his girl, sir.
"Is that so? Dubin, you're turning out to be more interesting than I imagined. Well, whatever you call her, she's stuck to him like glue, right?"
"Oh, I expect she's with him, sir. I just doubt she'd do anything to jeopardize him. That's why I wasn't sure if I should bother you with this. I realize you've got your hands full, General, but the arrest is under your command."
"You did right, Dubin. And don't worry about us. We're kicking the shit out of these pricks. Not that it wouldn't be going even better if our President stopped mousing around with the Russians. We should be in Saarbriicken, but FDR's afraid if we move into Germany too fast Stalin will go batty." Teedle held up there, clearly reconsidering the wisdom of his remarks over an open telephone line. The heavy guns went off again in a second and the connection was lost.
A few days later, on December 15, I was in the officers' mess at about 7:00 a. M., eating a breakfast of powdered eggs with Tony, when a pimply young orderly, a new recruit who took virtually every development as an occasion for hysteria, flew in to tell me that I was wanted in the signal office. It was Teedle, this time at the other end of a coded teletype writer. Once the signalman indicated I was present, the machine began spitting tape, which the code reader transferred with intense chattering onto the yellow bale in the machine.
"Bastard located," Teedle wrote. "Up near town of Houffalize in the VIII Corps sector. Robin Hood now. Whole merry band with him. Told VIII Corps command was sent by OSS to reconnoiter German positions. Wish you proceed to Houffalize to arrest."
"Me?" I said this to the signalman, who asked if I wanted to transmit that response. I chose something more diplomatic, suggesting the duty might be better suited to the Provost Marshal.
"Negative. You will recognize subject," he wrote back. "Also know entire background. MPs here have combat responsibilities with POWs. We are fighting a war FYI."
I considered my alternatives, but ultimately responded that I understood my orders.
Teedle wrote, "Subject due back in 72 hours. Presently scouting behind enemy lines."
"How likely to return?'
"Very. Left girl behind. Proceed at once. Will notify London of imminent arrest."
I went immediately to Colonel Maples. With Teedle, I had been reluctant to raise technicalities, knowing he would not tolerate them, but there was a fundamental problem. I opened a copy of the Manual for Courts-Martial on the Colonel's desk to Rule 20.