City of God (23 page)

A child stillborn in the mid- or late twenties

perhaps another brother

or a sister, who would have watched over me in the park

in the solemn responsibility engendered by my mother

and held me up to the water fountain when I was thirsty

The girl, Ruth would say for years afterward even when I was grown,

whom she had always wanted, the daughter for her loneliness in her house of males.

I mention such personal matters

only to indicate my place and time, the slender authority

I have for speaking of this century,

An observer obscurely situated

Apart from all the huge historical terrors, though there's always time, isn't there.

But now I confess how hard it is imagining my father as a wild kid, daring, headstrong,

Childhood being something that belonged to me, or my brother, our property, not his

and remembering him by contrast

as a serious portly man sitting in a chair by the radio

Listening to the news of the Second World War while at the same time reading of the war in the evening paper he held out like a field tent.

My father has been dead for forty years as I write

And I confess, dispirited, that the longer he is dead the more mysterious he's become in my memory

The personality fading, or becoming more complex,

we are left with a confirmed but invisible fact

a spirit without fallible character though remembered as a fallible man

Who did some things right and some things wrong

But who exists now as pure soul that suffered life and finally was done in by it

Though I keep and cherish my images of him
against this sad truth of the characterless soul that is to me a meager consolation for the failure of brilliant life to maintain forever its rich specificity.

He played tennis in white ducks, I have a photograph

taken with one of those foldable Leicas of the time

that extend their accordioned black boxes along two tracks

A smart forehand at the risen end of the swing,

the body pointed forward,

a white long-sleeved shirt, dark hair, a dark mustache

A figure on the far side of the net, most of the picture being of the ground

A public court of brown clay, with an anonymous back just passing the corner of the lens in close-up

Chasing the ball forever, forever unknown

The apartment houses of the Bronx in the background

Everything circa 1925 in sepia.

She played too, my mother,

They would go out and hit into the 1930s

while I stood outside the chicken-wire fence

and nagged them for my turn.

She is buried next to him

in the Beth-El cemetery in New Jersey

But having survived him by thirty-seven years

is a lingering personality in my mind.

During her last illness she celebrated her birthday

an Intensive Care patient, just off the respirator.

Congratulations, Mother, I said. You're ninety-five today.

One eyebrow rose, the eye opened, the slightest smile was called back from her fading life:

Ninety-four, she said.

It was our last conversation.

And I feel her death now, some years afterward, as an uncharacteristic silence,
a silence from someone who should be telling us what she thinks of our taste, or our ways of doing things

While announcing that she does not give an opinion unless it's asked for.

The last technology that she didn't understand or trust

was the phone answering machine: “Call Mother,”

is all she'd allow herself to say to my recorded request for a name a number a message

Clearly, sensibly, speaking not to a human being but to a machine, and speaking machine-talk to it.

Call Mother
is what I would expect to hear today

had we installed a telephone in her grave.

In 1917, my father's naval training completed he received his ensign's commission

and shortly thereafter sailed as a signal officer on a troopship to Europe

Still in the wrong-colored uniform

Among deckloads of backpacking, leg-putteed doughboys.

But then, mysteriously, or perhaps not all that mysteriously,

His rank having been conferred by an institution that wasn't Annapolis

He was assigned to land duty in the trenches

as a naval observer of ground-war communications.

It is true, communication was his specialty

as it has been the specialty of all men in my family

at least since my grandfather came to America in 1887 and took up the printer's trade.

Of course he knew that light shutters and semaphoring depended on the open sea

but telegraphy and telephony, on which the army relied, were just as useless in the trenches

when the barrage that preceded every German attack blasted away in a couple of salvos the cables and wires

so painstakingly laid to battalion headquarters,

And when the telegraph lines strung on poles

along the supply roads, and railroad spurs, and past the ordnance dumps and field hospitals

from regiment back to division

needed only one pole of shaved and creosoted pine to rise in the air as if launched

by the thousand-pound shell of a heavy howitzer and as if it were a lance thrown by Achilles with streamers of wire like a comet's tail

to leave a general as ignorant of the truth of his battle

as some wretched infantryman crouching alone inside his uniform

and the protracted, continuous roar of a distant bombardment

the answer in impenetrable war code to his inquiries.

My observant father understood this at a glance,

It didn't take an Einstein he said to me with a laugh,

War was the emergent property of human thought,

As stolidity is the emergent property of molecules of oak.

Responding to the navy's deepest hopes for him

he cross-dressed, donning the khaki tunic and tinpot of the dead signal lieutenant who had been his host

And while the air whistled and concussed and the earth all around him rose and fell like the heaviest sea

he took command of the surviving soldiers of the signal company

still from their giant wooden spools unwinding new lines of communication as the old ones were blown to bits

Or lofting from their upraised hands the carrier pigeons

that returned magically as spiraling clumps of blooded feathers,

And re-created them a company of runners, dispatching two-man teams to carry the front's intelligence to headquarters and relay the staff commands to the front,

because runners were the only thing that worked,

although the news they brought
might be an hour or more behind the action.

Now for the longest time the American general Pershing

had kept his fresh armies intact under his own command

But in 1917, with things getting worse for the Allies

Whose total dead, British and French, by then numbered something over four million men

most of them having died obedient, young, dumbfounded, and in the enlisted ranks,

elements of the American Second Army, to which my father had been attached as naval observer,

were deployed under French command

along the southern reaches of the broad battleground

that stretched from the Belgian coast on the North Sea

southeasterly in a great crescent of devastation to the Swiss border at Bernevesin.

So I picture my father in the state of war a state neither French nor German nor American but founded to contest all sense and meaning.

Very flares lighted the night sky a radiant mustard

Shells blew in sizzling flashes, like ground lightning

And in the acrid white fog of the following sunlit morning

when the German infantry was understood to be finally advancing

behind the forward-creeping bursts of mortars and field pieces

that were the footfalls of approaching Death to the young men in the trenches

he found himself the last surviving runner of the signal company he had come to observe but had passionately adopted

The man beside him having flung out his arms and dropped to his knees for a final prayer

in their open-field run back to the trenches.

Now I have no proof of this, but in the years I was his son at home,

his older son Ronald away at his world war

my father liked to take us to the Sunday games of the New York football Giants.

They played in the old Polo Grounds at Coogan's Bluff.

We sat in the sun, I ate a bag of peanuts, he smoked his cigar.

And he would be knowledgeably silent amid the noisy expertise of the men around us.

I loved the green grass field with the white stripes and the sound of the punt that would boom through the stadium

a long moment after the ball was kicked. I rooted for the Giants, always, but he liked close games

and plays that outsmarted the opponent, no matter by whom.

He loved the runners of the game, for instance, in the post-war, “Crazy Legs” Hirsch of the L.A. Rams

who brought a crowd to its feet with his quick cuts and feints and spins

and who, with his leaps over tacklers, his high-

stepping, heart-stopping evasions of sudden arrest, all suggestive of a comic intelligence,

could make a run, no matter how short,

last longer than anyone had a right to expect.

And I have no proof of this, but I think my father remembered his own runs under fire as an inexplicable survival

and sought to soothe his terrible remembrances with the aesthetic abstraction of football

a military game with lines and rules and no great or lasting consequences.

In any event, he had brought the orders to retreat but found them anticipated.

The ranks were falling back the way he had come.

In the trenches dead men were slumped in small heaps as if consoling one another in their grief for the damage they'd sustained

Or they stood, bayonets fixed, floridly alert poised and awaiting the attack

their internal organs having ruptured

in the concussed vacuum of a shell burst.

He made his way transversely through the zigzagged trenches

looking for someone to whom he could report

but finding only rats cavorting in the shit and mud among the stores of biscuit and torn limbs,

Rats trajecting like small shells in every direction as he approached.

He stumbled over a young soldier lying with the muzzle of his own rifle in his mouth and his head resting in an amalgam of brain and mud.

My father stopped and hunkered down and, for the first time since coming to France, felt close enough to someone to mourn him.

This boy had been unable to endure the hours and hours of cannonade

that my father had barely heard
as he took upon himself the urgencies of battle.

But now it opened up on him, as if he were this fellow's heir,

The terrible din, mechanical yet voiced as human, a thunderous chest-beating boast of colossal, spittingly cruel, brutish, and vindictive fury

which he imagined as the primordial conversation,

when a tank loomed above him, the muddied treads rampaging in air,

and in a great grinding spankling roar
spanned the trench and brought a rain of oil in the darkness upon him.

Now friends I know this is Ancient History as ancient as our grade school teachers

whom we hold in our memories with the same condescension.

I know that. I know the bones of the First World War are impressed in the continent's tectonic plates

under the weight of the bones buried over them.

That Europe's beaches are adrift with sanded bone

That her farmers in their fields plow up loops of chained vertebrae

Her rivers at night are luminous with the risen free radicals of calcification

And the archaeologists of her classical cities find skulls in tiers under the streets.

But listen for a moment. All history has contrived to pour this beer into your glass,

it has brought the sad, jeaned lady at the bar's end her Marlboros,

given the mirror behind those bottles its particular tarnish

and, not incidentally, lit us in this neon-blue light of illusory freedom.

How old was my father, twenty-four, twenty-five?

Here he was, a sailor, a lover of the sea, steeped in the earth's muck,

a young man defending a country not his own,

a runner run to ground,

everything he'd made of himself negated somehow in the wholehearted bestowal of his youth

and with an army of Huns hurdling over his prostrate form.

Not that he was a political innocent—

He'd learned from his father, my grandfather Isaac, the printer,

the sweet values of the civil religion, socialism.

He knew the German boys who would kill him if he moved were closer to him in what they had to gain or lose

than they were to the generals, and the regal families who directed them.

He knew that society was structured vertically not laterally

and that for a moment before the war had flared across Europe

not just the artists and intellectuals in the cafés of Paris and Vienna and Berlin

who wrote their aesthetic manifestos on cloth napkins and held their smoking Gauloises and Navy Cuts between their thumbs and forefingers,

but the people working in the factories and digging in the coal mines for their pittances

and the schoolteachers, shop assistants, and streetcar conductors,

proposed that they were not French or German or Italian but members of the universal working class that spanned all borders
and was universally enslaved to capitalism
and its monarchical appurtenances
and its nationalist ideologies that were pure
bullshit.

Ah the twenty-eighth of June, a bitter chill it was when a Serbian, Princip, blew away the Hapsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand, but more disastrously the Austrian Socialist party, whose betrayed members were soon enlisting alongside everyone else.