Old Men at Midnight Read online

  The car lurched and plunged and climbed through a dip in the cobblestone street. Europe cobbled with the bones of war dead. Where did I read that? So tired this morning. All that anger in Chicago, exhausting. Is that rain? No, street grit on the windshield. His eyes swollen with fatigue; his fingers tight on the wheel, aching.

  He steered the Saab into the side-street garage and left it with an attendant. Umbrella in one hand and briefcase in the other; he had a gangly, flat-footed walk. Dark homburg and charcoal-gray suit; starched white shirt and icy yellow tie. Curious glances from the jeans and T-shirt crowd. Evelyn tells me that I bring to mind T. S. Eliot walking to his bank. Big fuss in academe now over Eliot’s wretched anti-Semitism. Suddenly discovered America, as my father would say.

  He took one of the pedestrian paths into College Walk.

  The paved center lane was crowded with cars. Water splashing in the fountains of the plaza. Steps thronged with students. The sunless air strangely still; the flags drooping on their tall poles. Security guards: alert for the rites and tumults of spring? Posters announcing meetings, films, plays, demonstrations. Gays. Lesbians. Afro-Americans. Asians. Women’s rights. Pro-Lifers. America Balkanized. E pluribus plura. What is this? A colloquium on Heidegger. Repellent philosophy from a damnable man. And another on Derrida. That too shall pass. All this academic cacophony, with the city as backdrop. Beginning to rain.

  He rode the elevator up to his office and some while later sat before a microphone lecturing to nearly one hundred students in a large, stuffy hall whose open windows seemed to suck in the noises of the cars, buses, trucks, and pedestrians on the four-lane street. A steady background of sound during the fifty minutes of the class. Some of the students slept. One kept rolling his head: probably on drugs.

  Before lunch a dissertation conference with a graduate student: a nervous, balding young man from India, too anxious to please. Then a lengthy telephone conversation with Stuart Fox, the head of the history department, about a candidate for a recently vacated professorship. Replacing the telephone, he turned to his mail. Invitations to conferences in Washington, D.C., Berlin, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam. Keynote a State Department think tank in Aspen. A request from a prestigious journal of American history for a piece on his army experience in Europe during the war. A catalog from a rare-book dealer in London. Behind him a sudden rumble of thunder. Turning, he saw through the tall window a whitish-green sky and, after a moment, a flash of lightning. Again, thunder. A light rain falling.

  He ate lunch alone in the faculty club—a bowl of soup, a green salad, coffee. Many called out greetings as they moved past his table; none offered handshakes; nearly all knew of his fragile hands. It was raining steadily when he left the club.

  He detoured to the library, entered the stacks, and in a cool, silent corridor lined with books discovered half a shelf of critical works on I. D. Chandal: one by an Oxford scholar, another published by Harvard, yet another by Chicago; a volume in the Twayne’s United States Author Series; a number of UMI-printed dissertations; and a Modern Critical Views volume, with essays by Alfred Kazin, Harold Bloom, Robert Alter, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and Cynthia Ozick. He took with him the work by the Oxford scholar and the collection of essays.

  Leaving the library, he ran into Robert Helman, who was standing in the doorway, looking forlorn and waiting for the rain to let up.

  “Robert, share my umbrella.”

  Robert Helman murmured his thanks and ducked under the protective cover.

  Together they walked in the rain, Benjamin Walter tall and mannerly, Robert Helman slight, in his mid-sixties, graying beard and hair, red bow tie, rumpled dark suit.

  The rain was suddenly wind-driven, heavy, drumming upon the umbrella. Students rushed by. On the paths were miniature dark seas made turbulent by the wind and rain.

  “Your wife?” asked Helman under the umbrella.

  “Not well, I’m afraid.”

  “So sorry. A difficult time for you.” His small voice, with its Middle European accent, sounding breathless, barely audible.

  Benjamin Walter thought: Theresienstadt, sixteen months. Twelve months in Auschwitz. Helman an expert on difficult times.

  “Your trip to Chicago?”

  “Be careful of that puddle. Stormy opposition to the war. Saddam Hussein sitting on our oil flow an insufficient reason for interference in a regional quarrel.”

  “They favored appeasement?”

  He knows about appeasement, too. Prague his provenance. “Inclined toward waiting.”

  “Evil feeds on waiting.”

  The wind gusted, the rain slanted, the umbrella jerked and pulled.

  They entered their building. Benjamin Walter shook the rain from the umbrella. Puddles formed on the floor.

  Helman delicately raised the bottoms of his trousers, tapped the rain from his shoes. He said, clearing his throat and adjusting his bow tie, “The candidate for the position in history, did you hear?”

  “Oh, yes, the news reached me.”

  “And did you hear that she does not have the necessary language?”

  “That I heard too, yes.”

  “Don’t you think it strange, Benjamin, for the university to hire someone to teach the history of a people who doesn’t know that people’s language?”

  “Fox told me this morning that he is taking the position that she was deprived of a proper language education because she’s a woman.”

  “Oh, really? Well, I was deprived of a proper education in physics because of my genealogy. Am I therefore now able to teach physics?”

  “Fox claims that her dissertation is outstanding.”

  “Benjamin, permit me to tell you a little story about dissertations and doctorates. In my current research on the Wannsee Conference I have discovered that, of the fifteen men who sat around the table establishing the bureaucracy for the murder of European Jewry, eight held doctorates.”

  “Fox wants this woman and will turn it into a war.”

  “How sad if he does that.”

  “You’ll lose even if you win.”

  “And what is your position on this?”

  “I’ve written on war in Japan, and I don’t know Japanese. Good translators are more than adequate.”

  “I don’t know about the Japanese. I know about Jewish history. No language, no historian. This will be a war worth waging.”

  “Fox won’t forget, Robert. He’ll make you pay in a thousand ways, and war will be the winner. War always wins.”

  Robert Helman shook his head and sighed. Pale forehead creased, eyes deeply furrowed at the corners; premature aging and permanent sadness, wearing visibly his years in the German factories of murder. A great historian, hard-nosed, public and private opponent to Benjamin Walter’s notion of underlying cords of connection, a proponent of what he called the three laws of the chaos theory of history: chance, chance, and chance. The haphazard, the accidental, the arbitrary, the contingent; discrete events banging randomly against one another, with humans creating the fiction of connection. “Historians record, clerics connect”—an oft-quoted remark of his, uttered in exasperation one day at a conference. His wife taught art history at the university, they lived in a nearby apartment building with an exquisite view of the river, and there were four grown and lovely children.

  Robert Helman thanked Benjamin Walter for the sanctuary of his umbrella, asked to be remembered to Evelyn, and went off to meet with Stuart Fox.

  Some minutes later, Benjamin Walter stood at the tall window between the floor-to-ceiling bookcases in his office, watching the rain. The quadrangle, dripping and depleted of hues, lay deserted. A diagonal streak of lightning ripped across the sky, followed almost immediately by drumbeats of thunder that rattled the windows. In the ensuing silence he thought he heard someone at the door.

  “Come.”

  The door opened and a young man entered and closed the door. He wore rain-stained blue jeans and a soaked white T-shirt and sandals with no socks. Muscular a
rms and chest, veins and tendons clearly showing. Blond hair tied back in a ponytail, wet strands on his forehead and ruddy cheeks. A small gold earring.

  The young man said in a matter-of-fact tone, “Professor, I can’t take the exam, I’ve got to go home right away.”

  Benjamin Walter recognized him. A senior, infrequently present in class, with a show of indifference to the subject, but very bright those few times he’d spoken up. His parents of western Pennsylvania aristocracy.

  “I do not give makeup examinations.”

  “Professor, I was just on the phone with my mother. My best friend, the friend I went to school with from third grade on, is very sick.”

  “That’s of no—”

  “I mean, it’s pretty serious. He’s in some kind of a depression or something, and he’s asking for me.”

  Benjamin Walter said, “In such matters, the department requires corroboration.”

  “I can get that.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “He’s at Yale.” Blue eyes chilly even in this distress. Features blank. Flat, glacial voice. Bred for self-control. “So can I take a makeup exam?”

  Benjamin Walter nodded.

  The young man left the office without another word.

  Outside the rain had come to an end. Water dripped from the branches of the scrawny street trees. Patches of blue sky shone above soaring gold-rimmed clouds.

  He sat for some while, working on his memoirs, filling the margins of the manuscript with notes in his minuscule handwriting. Two hours went by, the phone did not ring, no one knocked on his door. But it was futile; he had already set down most of the middle and more recent years, but nothing of the beginning, nothing to which he could connect his later life—and how does one write a life without a seed, a source, a commencement? His mother and father and sister and brother, he remembered. But there was someone else he could recall only in dim outline, a teacher, yes, a teacher of trope, but, more important, also of, of—elusive, a phantom of some kind. Why am I not able to resurrect him?

  He put down his pen and sat back, exhausted, his fingers aching. No more work on the memoirs today. Thus far, the memoirs a book without a beginning.

  Umbrella in one hand, briefcase containing the manuscript in the other, he walked to the garage and retrieved his Saab. The air smelled of dank streets. Late-afternoon sunlight cast a pale-pink wash across the walls of tall buildings. Traffic inched along the streets to the parkway. He drove with his windows open, staring fixedly at the road, ignoring the horns directed at him.

  The sky was barely lit when he entered the town. Streetlights shone upon the debris-strewn wet roads. When he turned into his driveway he was momentarily startled, certain he had erred: this was not his home.

  Jagged fragments of raw wood lay everywhere, on the lawn and the driveway and near the garage, some small, others the height of a man and thrust deep into the earth. Blocking the end of the driveway just beyond the entrance to the garage, was a huge tree limb. Beyond the rhododendron hedge stood the Tudor, all its windows ablaze. And emerging from the line of trees and hurrying toward him was I. D. Chandal.

  2

  The two oaks at the edge of the woods were nearly as old as the core of the house, and the cemetery beyond the woods was older still, with some gravestones from colonial times. And the woods between the cemetery and the house—the wild, cool growth of trees and underbrush with their greenish whisperings and murmurings—the woods predated all.

  From the first moment he’d set eyes on the house more than thirty years ago he’d silently accepted it as an echoing link with a moment in his past from which he no longer felt a need to flee; the woods and cemetery seemed to possess a kind of welcome enchantment. The history of the house—recounted by the realtor—contained a beguiling mystery.

  Built originally as a farmhouse during the Revolutionary War, said the realtor. Whoever owned it around the time of the War of 1812 knocked down an outside wall and added a room that doubled the size of the ground floor. The one who owned it during the Civil War built a new staircase: dark oak steps and a carved banister smooth and warm to the touch. Near the end of the First World War, before the winter froze the earth and the influenza epidemic began its murderous rampage, the then owner put down a patio of brick and flagstone outside the kitchen. And during the Second World War the people who owned it had a den built in the space between the rear wall of the parlor and the back lawn.

  When Benjamin Walter had stood in the driveway gazing at the house that first time, an odd shiver had coursed through him, a pull of memory, and he asked the realtor if he could take a walk alone through the woods. He went about for a while in the cool green interior, the earth soft and moist beneath his shoes. Insects buzzed in the lacy patterns of sunlight that shone like shimmering water on the leaves. A rhythmic hum of cicadas and the sweetly piercing sounds of birdsong and the rustle of animal life in the underbrush. Trees tall and old, thick-trunked, bark like the hide of elephants, bulging roots deep and gnarled. Beyond the woods lay a gently rising sward, a cemetery, gravestones ancient and recent. The trees were still that day. The trees were merely trees that day.

  Evelyn had wondered if the Tudor next door might be for sale. Closer to her heart, that sort of house. Keen memories of her family’s country home before the war, before she’d met and fallen in love with her Yank, before the years at Oxford, before the wrenching move to the United States.

  The realtor had made inquiries. No, the Tudor was not for sale. Its owners were quite content and had no intention of selling, thank you very much.

  So they made an offer on the old farmhouse and accepted the counteroffer and signed the settlement papers in November 1963, four days before the assassination of John Kennedy.

  Five years later, they had completed major books: he on war, she on Virginia Woolf. The children young and active: the house untidy, crowded, and clamorous with their friends.

  Evelyn loved to give dinner parties. People came from New York and Princeton. Scholars, poets, writers, artists.

  He and Evelyn decided to expand the kitchen. The country was then at war in Vietnam. He was at a sociology conference organized by Philip Rieff at the University of Pennsylvania the day workers broke through the outside wall of the kitchen and found the old newspapers. Six-year-old Kevin mentioned it the next day during dinner.

  “Which newspapers?”

  “Old newspapers, Daddy.”

  “What are we talking about here?”

  “Stinky old,” said Kevin.

  “You are a stupid little fellow,” said Laura, twelve, the older daughter. “Newspapers from the First World War, Daddy.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Mother threw them into the trash,” said Beth, nine, the younger daughter.

  He looked across the table at Evelyn.

  “Ben, they were falling to pieces.”

  After dinner he went outside and brought the trash can into the kitchen and hauled out crumpled brownish newspapers, which he set down on the floor and opened carefully. Pages dry and brittle. A local newspaper, the Nyack Eagle, no longer in existence. Its masthead an American flag draped around an eagle; headlines black and bold. Probably stuffed into the wall for insulation. Evelyn and the children stood around watching quietly as he spread the newspapers on the floor in proper sequence. The headlines read:

  AUSTRIA DECLARES WAR,

  RUSHES VAST ARMY INTO SERBIA

  BRITAIN ON VERGE OF WAR WITH GERMANY

  LUSITANIA SUNK BY A SUBMARINE,

  PROBABLY 1,200 DEAD

  WILSON BREAKS WITH GERMANY; WAR IMMINENT

  WAR IS DECLARED BY U.S.

  GERMANS TAKE MOST OF MESSINES RIDGE

  GERMANS GET CHEMIN DES DAMES IN NEW DRIVE

  OVER 1,000,000 U.S. SOLDIERS SENT ABROAD

  AMERICANS DRIVE GERMANS BACK OVER MARNE

  GERMANS AGREE TO SIGN; NO CONDITIONS

  GERMANY GIVES UP; WAR ENDS AT 2 P.M.

  One of the
pages disintegrated as he unfolded it. He set out its bits and pieces on the kitchen table:

  M RI NS TACK B TWE SE D AR ONNE OREST

  “ ‘Americans attack between Meuse and Argonne Forest,’ ” he said to his wife and children, feeling a sudden drumming in his chest. Argonne. Ardennes. Memories of his own war.

  The kitchen had begun to reek of rot and mold. He scooped up the newspapers and carried them to his study.

  In the days that followed, he’d cut out the headlines, had them mounted and framed—four frames in all—and hung them on the wall in his study, which held memorabilia of his life: degrees, awards, accolades, photographs with distinguished colleagues, university presidents, senators, and Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. He had a skilled craftsman glue the headline fragments to a heavy gray matte cardboard and enclose it all beneath nonglare glass in a black frame, which he hung on the wall over his desk. The framed headlines cast an odd imbalance over the room, as if dwarfing everything else on the walls and even the glass-enclosed floor-to-ceiling bookcases with their rare and precious volumes and folios on war.

  “They are quite overpowering,” Evelyn said.

  “Part of the history of this house.”

  “But that wasn’t our war, darling.”

  “Oh, yes, it was. One long war with a brief respite to facilitate recovery from the influenza epidemic and rearming. It was certainly my parents’ war.”

  “You never talk about them, but you’ll put their war on your walls.”

  “Nothing to talk about, my dear. They lived, they died. Unremarkable people.”