Jailbird. Part 2

And I lifted my old hands from the folded bedding and I clapped three times.

Another fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. I thought this: "At least I don't smoke anymore." It was true. I, who used to smoke four packages of unfiltered Pall Malls a day, was no longer a slave to King Nicotine. I would soon be reminded of how much I used to smoke, for the gray, pinstripe, three-piece Brooks Brothers suit awaiting me over in the supply room would be riddled with cigarette burns. There was a hole the size of a dime in the crotch, I remembered. A newspaper photograph was taken of me as I sat in the back of the federal marshal's green sedan, right after I was sentenced to prison. It was widely interpreted as showing how ashamed I was, haggard, horrified, unable to look anyone in the eye. It was in fact a photograph of a man who had just set his pants on fire.

I thought now about Sacco and Vanzetti. When I was young, I believed that the story of their martyrdom would cause an irresistible mania for justice to the common people to spread throughout the world. Does anybody know or care who they were anymore?

No.

I thought about the Cuyahoga Ma.s.sacre, which was the bloodiest single encounter between strikers and an employer in the history of American labor. It happened in Cleveland, in front of the main gate of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, on Christmas morning in Eighteen-hundred and Ninety-four. That was long before I was born. My parents were still children in the Russian Empire when it happened. But the man who sent me to Harvard, Alexander Hamilton McCone, watched it from the factory clock tower in the company of his father and his older brother John. That was when he ceased to be a slight stammerer and became, when the least bit anxious about anything, a bubbling b.o.o.by of totally blocked language instead.

Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, incidentally, lost its ident.i.ty, save in labor history, long ago. It was absorbed by Youngstown Steel shortly after the Second World War, and Youngstown Steel itself has now become a mere division of The RAMJAC Corporation.

Peace.

Yes, and I lifted my old hands from the folded bedding, and I clapped three times. Here was what that was all about, as silly as it was: Those three claps completed a rowdy song I had never liked, and which I had not thought about for thirty years or more. I was making my mind as blank as possible, you see, since the past was so embarra.s.sing and the future so terrifying. I had made so many enemies over the years that I doubted that I could even get a job as a bartender somewhere. I would simply get dirtier and raggedier, I thought, since I would have no money coming in from anywhere. I would wind up on Skid Row and learn to keep the cold out by drinking wine, I thought, although I had never liked alcohol.

The worst thing, I thought, was that I would be asleep in an alley in the Bowery, say, and juvenile delinquents who loathed dirty old men would come along with a can of gasoline. They would soak me in it, and they would touch me off. And the worst thing about that, I thought, would be having my eyeb.a.l.l.s lapped by flames.

No wonder I craved an empty mind!

But I could achieve mental vacancy only intermittently. Most of the time, as I sat there on the cot, I settled for an only slightly less perfect peace, which was filled with thoughts that need not scare me-about Sacco and Vanzetti, as I say, and about the Cuyahoga Ma.s.sacre, about playing chess with old Alexander Hamilton McCone, and on and on.

Perfect blankness, when I achieved it, lasted only ten seconds or so-and then it would be wrecked by the song, sung loudly and clearly in my head by an alien voice, which required for its completion that I clap three times. The words were highly offensive to me when I first heard them, which was at a drunken stag party at Harvard during my freshman year. It was a song to be kept secret from women. It may be that no woman has ever heard it, even at this late date. The intent of the lyricist, obviously, was to so coa.r.s.en the feelings of males who sang the song that the singers could never believe again what most of us believed with all our hearts back then: that women were more spiritual, more sacred than men.

I still believe that about women. Is that, too, comical? I have loved only four women in my life-my mother, my late wife, a woman to whom I was once affianced, and one other. I will describe them all by and by. Let it be said now, though, that all four seemed more virtuous, braver about life, and closer to the secrets of the universe than I could ever be.

Be that as it may, I will now set down the words to the frightful song. And even though I have been technically responsible, because of my high position in a corporate structure in recent years, for the publication of some of the most scurrilous books about women ever written, I still find myself shrinking from setting on paper, where they have perhaps never been before, the words to the song. The tune to which they were sung, incidentally, was an old one, a tune that I call "Ruben, Ruben." It no doubt has many other names.

Readers of the words should realize, too, that I heard them sung not by middle-aged roughnecks, but by college boys, by children, really, who, with a Great Depression going on and with a Second World War coming, and with most of them mocked by their own virginity, had reason to be petrified of all the things that women of that time would expect of them. Women would expect them to earn good money after they graduated, and they did not see how they could do that, with all the businesses shutting down. Women would expect them to be brave soldiers, and there seemed every chance that they would go to pieces when the shrapnel and bullets flew. Who could be absolutely responsible for his own reactions when the shrapnel and bullets flew? There would be flame throwers and poison gas. There would be terrific bangs. The man standing beside you could have his head blown off-and his throat would be a fountain.

And women, when they became their wives, would expect them to be perfect lovers even on the wedding night-subtle, tender, raffish, respectful, t.i.tillatingly debauched, and knowing as much about the reproductive organs of both s.e.xes as Harvard Medical School.

I recall a discussion of a daring magazine article that appeared at that time. It told of the frequency of s.e.xual intercourse by American males in various professions and trades. Firemen were the most ardent, making love ten times a week. College professors were the least ardent, making love once a month. And a cla.s.smate of mine, who, as it happened, would actually be killed in the Second World War, shook his head mournfully and said, "Gee-I'd give anything to be a college professor."

The shocking song, then, may really have been a way of honoring the powers of women, of dealing with the fears they inspired. It might properly be compared with a song making fun of lions, sung by lion hunters on a night before a hunt.

The words were these: Sally in the garden, Sifting cinders, Lifted up her leg And farted like a man.

The bursting of her bloomers Broke sixteen winders.

The cheeks of her a.s.s went- Here the singers, in order to complete the stanza, were required to clap three times.

2.

MY OFFICIAL t.i.tLE in the Nixon White House, the job I was holding when I was arrested for embezzlement, perjury, and obstruction of justice, was this: the President's special advisor on youth affairs. I was paid thirty-six thousand dollars a year. I had an office, but no secretary, in the subbas.e.m.e.nt of the Executive Office Building, directly underneath, as it happened, the office where burglaries and other crimes on behalf of President Nixon were planned. I could hear people walking overhead and raising their voices sometimes. On my own level in the subbas.e.m.e.nt my only companions were heating and air-conditioning equipment and a Coca-Cola machine that only I knew about, I think. I was the only person to patronize that machine. in the Nixon White House, the job I was holding when I was arrested for embezzlement, perjury, and obstruction of justice, was this: the President's special advisor on youth affairs. I was paid thirty-six thousand dollars a year. I had an office, but no secretary, in the subbas.e.m.e.nt of the Executive Office Building, directly underneath, as it happened, the office where burglaries and other crimes on behalf of President Nixon were planned. I could hear people walking overhead and raising their voices sometimes. On my own level in the subbas.e.m.e.nt my only companions were heating and air-conditioning equipment and a Coca-Cola machine that only I knew about, I think. I was the only person to patronize that machine.

Yes, and I read college and high-school newspapers and magazines, and Rolling Stone Rolling Stone and and Crawdaddy Crawdaddy, and anything else that claimed to speak for youth. I catalogued political statements in the words of popular songs. My chief qualification for the job, I thought, was that I myself had been a radical at Harvard, starting in my junior year. Nor had I been cochairman of the Harvard chapter of the Young Communist League. I had been cochairman of a radical weekly paper, The Bay State Progressive The Bay State Progressive. I was in fact, openly and proudly, a card-carrying communist until Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-nine. h.e.l.l and heaven, as I saw it, were making common cause against weakly defended peoples everywhere. After that I became a cautious believer in capitalistic democracy again.

It was once so acceptable in this country to be a communist that my being one did not prevent my winning a Rhodes Scholars.h.i.+p to Oxford after Harvard, and then landing a job in Roosevelt's Department of Agriculture after that. What could be so repulsive after all, during the Great Depression, especially, and with yet another war for natural wealth and markets coming, in a young man's belief that each person could work as well as he or she was able, and should be rewarded, sick or well, young or old, brave or frightened, talented or imbecilic, according to his or her simple needs? How could anyone treat me as a person with a diseased mind if I thought that war need never come again-if only common people everywhere would take control of the planet's wealth, disband their national armies, and forget their national boundaries; if only they would think of themselves ever after as brothers and sisters, yes, and as mothers and fathers, too, and children of all other common people-everywhere. The only person who would be excluded from such friendly and merciful society would be one who took more wealth than he or she needed at any time.

And even now, at the rueful age of sixty-six, I find my knees still turn to water when I encounter anyone who still considers it a possibility that there will one day be one big happy peaceful family on Earth-the Family of Man. If I were this very day to meet myself as I was in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-three, I would swoon with pity and respectfulness.

So my idealism did not die even in the Nixon White House, did not die even in prison, did not die even when I became, my most recent employment, a vice-president of the Down Home Records Division of The RAMJAC Corporation.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

When I was Richard M. Nixon's special advisor on youth affairs, from Nineteen-hundred and Seventy until my arrest in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-five, smoking four packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day, n.o.body ever asked me for facts or opinions or anything. I need not even have come to work, and I might have spent my time better in helping my poor wife with the little interior-decorating business she ran out of our right little, tight little brick bungalow out in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The only visitors I ever had to my subterranean office, its walls golden-brown with cigarette tars, were the President's special burglars, whose office was above mine. They suddenly realized one day, when I had a coughing fit, that somebody was right below them, and that I might be able to hear their conversations. They performed experiments, with one of them yelling and stamping upstairs, and another one listening in my office. They satisfied themselves at last that I had heard nothing, and was a harmless old p.o.o.p, in any event. The yeller and stamper was a former Central Intelligence Agency operative, a writer of spy thrillers, and a graduate of Brown University. The listener below was a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a former district attorney, and a graduate of Fordham University. I myself, as I may have said already, was a Harvard man.

And this Harvard man, knowing full well that everything he wrote would be shredded and baled with all the rest of the White House wastepaper, unread, still turned out some two hundred or more weekly reports on the sayings and doings of youth, with footnotes, bibliographies, and appendices and all. But the conclusions implied by my materials changed so little over the years that I might as well have simply sent the same telegrams each week to limbo. It would have said this: YOUNG PEOPLE STILL REFUSE TO SEE THE OBVIOUS IMPOSSIBILITY OF WORLD DISARMAMENT AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY. COULD BE FAULT OF NEW TESTAMENT (QUOD VIDE).walter f. starbuck president's special advisor on youth affairs At the end of every futile day in the subbas.e.m.e.nt I would go home to the only wife I have ever had, who was Ruth-waiting for me in our little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She was Jewish, which I am not. So our only child, a son who is now a book reviewer for The New York Times The New York Times, is half-Jewish. He has further confused racial and religious matters by marrying a black nightclub singer, who has two children by a former husband. The former husband was a nightclub comedian of Puerto Rican extraction named Jerry Cha-cha Rivera, who was shot as an innocent bystander during the robbery of a RAMJAC carwash in Hollywood. My son has adopted the children, so that they are now legally my grandchildren, my only grandchildren.

Life goes on.

My late wife Ruth, the grandmother of these children, was born in Vienna. Her family owned a rarebook store there-before the n.a.z.is took it away from them. She was six years younger than I. Her father and mother and two siblings were killed in concentration camps. She herself was hidden by a Christian family, but was discovered and arrested, along with the head of that family, in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-two. So she herself was in a concentration camp near Munich, finally liberated by American troops, for the last two years of the war. She herself would die in her sleep in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-four-of congestive heart failure, two weeks before my own arrest. Whither I went, and no matter how clumsily, there did my Ruth go-as long as she could. If I marveled at this out loud, she would say, "Where else could I be? What else could I do?"

She might have been a great translator, for one thing. Languages came so easily to her, as they did not to me. I spent four years in Germany after the Second World War, but never mastered German. But there was no European language that Ruth could not speak at least a little bit. She pa.s.sed the time in the concentration camp, waiting for death, by getting other prisoners to teach her languages she did not know. Thus did she become fluent in Romany, the tongue of the Gypsies, and even learned the words to some songs in Basque. She might have become a portrait artist. That was another thing she had done in prison: With a finger dipped in lampblack, she had drawn on the walls likenesses of those pa.s.sing through. She might have been a famous photographer. When she was only sixteen, three years before Germany annexed Austria, she photographed one hundred beggars in Vienna, all of whom were terribly wounded veterans of World War One. These were sold in portfolios, one of which I have found recently, and to my heartbroken amazement, in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. She could also play the piano, whereas I am tone-deaf. I cannot even sing "Sally in the Garden" on key.

I was Ruth's inferior, you might say.

When things started to go really badly for me in the fifties and sixties, when I was unable to get a decent job anywhere, despite all the high posts I had held in government, despite all the important people I knew, it was Ruth who rescued our unpopular little family out in Chevy Chase. She began with two failures, which depressed her at first, but which would later make her laugh so hard that tears streamed from her eyes. Her first failure was as a piano player in a c.o.c.ktail lounge. The proprietor, when he fired her, told her that she was too good, that his particular clientele "... didn't appreciate the finer things in life." Her second failure was as a wedding photographer. There was always an air of prewar doom about her photographs, which no retoucher would eradicate. It was as though the entire wedding party would wind up in the trenches or the gas chambers by and by.

But then she became an interior decorator, beguiling prospective clients with watercolors of rooms she would like to do for them. And I was her clumsy a.s.sistant, hanging draperies, holding wallpaper samples against a wall, taking telephone messages from clients, running errands, picking up swatches of this and that-and on and on. I set fire to eleven hundred dollars' worth of blue velvet draperies one time. No wonder my son never respected me.

When did he ever have a chance to?

My G.o.d-there his mother was, trying to support the family, and scrimping and saving to get by. And there his unemployed father was, always in the way and helpless, and finally setting fire to a fortune in draperies with a cigarette!

Hooray for a Harvard education! Oh, to be the proud son of a Harvard man!

Ruth was a tiny woman, incidentally-with coppery skin and straight black hair and high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. The first time I laid eyes on her, which was in Nuremberg, Germany, in late August of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-five, she was wearing voluminous army fatigues, and I mistook her for a Gypsy boy. I was a civilian employee of the Defense Department, thirty-two years old. I had never married. I had been a civilian all through the war, often exercising more real power than generals or admirals. Now I was in Nuremberg, ogling the wreckage of war for the first time. I had been sent over to oversee the feeding and housing of the American, British, French, and Russian delegations to the War Crimes Trials. I had previously set up recuperation centers for American soldiers in various resort areas in the United States, so I knew a little something about the hotel trade.

I was to be a dictator to the Germans as far as food and drink and beds were considered. My official vehicle was a white Mercedes touring car, a four-door convertible with a winds.h.i.+eld for the backseat as well as the front. It had a siren. It had little sockets on its front fenders for flags. I of course flew American flags. This dreamboat, as young people might call it, had been an anniversary present from Heinrich Himmler, the creator of concentration camps, to his wife in the good old days. Wherever I went, I had an armed chauffeur. My father, remember, had been a millionaire's armed chauffeur.

And I was being driven down the main street, the Konigstra.s.se, one August afternoon. The War Crimes Tribunal was meeting in Berlin but was going to move to Nuremberg as soon as I could get things ready there. The street was still blocked by rubble here and there. It was being cleared away by German prisoners of war, who labored, as it happened, under the smoldering gazes of black American military policemen. The American Army was still segregated in those days. Every unit was all black or all white, except for the officers, who were usually white in any case. I do not recall having felt that there was anything odd in this scheme. I knew nothing about black people. There had been no black people on the household staff of the McCone mansion in Cleveland, no black people in my schools. Not even when I was a communist had I had a black person for a friend.

Near Saint Martha's Church on the Konigstra.s.se, which had had its roof burned off by a firebomb, my Mercedes was halted at a security checkpoint. It was manned by white American Military Police. They were looking for people who were not where they were supposed to be, now that civilization was being started up again. They were seeking deserters from every imaginable army, including the American one, and war criminals not yet apprehended, and lunatics and common criminals, who had simply sauntered from the approaching front lines, and citizens of the Soviet Union, who had defected to the Germans or been captured by them, who would be imprisoned or killed, if they went back home. Russians were supposed, no matter what, to go back to Russia; Poles were supposed to go back to Poland; Hungarians to Hungary; Estonians to Estonia; and on and on. Everybody, no matter what, was supposed to go home.

I was curious as to what sort of interpreters the M.P.'s were using, since I was having trouble finding good ones for my own operations. I particularly needed people who were tri-lingual, who were fluent in both German and English, and in either French or Russian as well. They also had to be trustworthy, polite, and presentable. So I got out of my car to have a closer look at the interrogations. I discovered that they were being conducted, surprisingly, by a seeming Gypsy boy. It was my Ruth, of course. Her hair had all been cut off at a de-lousing station. She was wearing Army fatigues without any badges of unit or rank. She was beautiful to watch as she tried to elicit a glimmer of understanding from a ragbag of a man, whom the M.P.'s held before her. She must have tried seven or eight languages on him, slipping from one to another as easily as a musician changing tempos and keys. Not only that, but she altered her gestures, too, so that her hands were always doing appropriate dances to each language.

Suddenly, the man's hands were dancing as hers were, and the sounds coming from his mouth were like those she was making. As Ruth would tell me later, he was a Macedonian peasant from southern Yugoslavia. The language they had found in common was Bulgarian. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans, even though he had never been a soldier, and had been sent as a slave laborer to strengthen the forts of the Siegfried Line. He had never learned German. Now he wanted to go to America, he told Ruth, to become a very rich man. He was s.h.i.+pped back to Macedonia, I presume.

Ruth was then twenty-six years old-but she had eaten so bad for seven years, mostly potatoes and turnips, that she was an as.e.xual stick. She herself, it turned out, had come to the roadblock only an hour before I had, and had been pressed into service by the M.P.'s, because of all the languages she knew. I asked an M.P. sergeant how old he thought she was, and he guessed, "Fifteen." He thought she was a boy whose voice had yet to change.

I coaxed her into the backseat of my Mercedes and I questioned her there. I learned that she had been freed from a concentration camp in springtime, about four months before-and had since eluded every agency that might have liked to help her. She should by now have been in a hospital for displaced persons. She was uninterested in ever trusting anybody with her destiny anymore. Her plan was to roam alone and out-of-doors forever, from nowhere to nowhere in a demented sort of religious ecstasy. "No one ever touches me," she said, "and I never touch anyone. I am like a bird in flight. It is so beautiful. There is only G.o.d-and me."

I thought this of her: that she resembled gentle Ophelia in Hamlet Hamlet, who became fey and lyrical when life was too cruel to bear. I have a copy of Hamlet Hamlet at hand, and refresh my memory as to the nonsense Ophelia sang when she would no longer respond intelligently to those who asked how she was. at hand, and refresh my memory as to the nonsense Ophelia sang when she would no longer respond intelligently to those who asked how she was.

This was the song: How should I your true love know From another one?

By his c.o.c.kle hat and staff, And his sandal shoon.

He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a gra.s.s-green turf, At his heels a stone- And on and on.

Ruth, one of millions of Europe's Ophelias after the Second World War, fainted in my motorcar.

I took her to a twenty-bed hospital in the Kaiserburg Kaiserburg, the imperial castle, which wasn't even officially operating yet. It was being set up exclusively for persons a.s.sociated with the War Crimes Trials. The head of it was a Harvard cla.s.smate of mine, Dr. Ben Shapiro, who had also been a communist in student days. He was now a lieutenant colonel in the Army Medical Corps. Jews were not numerous at Harvard in my day. There was a strict quota, and a low one, as to how many Jews were let in each year.

"What have we here, Walter?" he said to me in Nuremberg. I was carrying the unconscious Ruth in my arms. She weighed no more than a handkerchief. "It's a girl," I said. "She's breathing. She speaks many languages. She fainted. That's all I know."

He had an idle staff of nurses, cooks, technicians, and so on, and the finest food and medicines that the Army could give him, since he was likely to have high-ranking persons for patients by and by. So Ruth received, and for nothing, the finest care available on the planet. Why? Mostly because, I think, Shapiro and I were both Harvard men.

One year later, more or less, on October fifteenth of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six, Ruth would become my wife. The War Crimes Trials were over. On the day we were married, and probably conceived our only child as well, Reichsmarschall Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide. Hermann Goring cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide.

It was vitamins and minerals and protein and, of course, tender, loving care, that made all the difference to Ruth. After only three weeks in the hospital she was a sane and witty Viennese intellectual. I hired her as my personal interpreter and took her everywhere with me. Through another Harvard acquaintance, a shady colonel in the Quartermaster Corps in Wiesbaden-a black marketeer, I'm sure-I was able to get her a suitable wardrobe, for which, mysteriously, I was never asked to pay anyone. The woolens were from Scotland, the cottons from Egypt-the silks from China, I suppose. The shoes were French-and prewar. One pair, I remember, was alligator, and came with a bag to match. The goods were priceless, since no store in Europe, or in North America, for that matter, had offered anything like them for years. The sizes, moreover, were exactly right for Ruth. These blackmarket treasures were delivered to my office in cartons claiming to contain mimeograph paper belonging to the Royal Canadian Air Force. Two taciturn young male citizens delivered them in what had once been a Wehrmacht Wehrmacht ambulance. Ruth guessed that one was Belgian and the other, like my mother, Lithuanian. ambulance. Ruth guessed that one was Belgian and the other, like my mother, Lithuanian.

My accepting those goods was surely my most corrupt act as a public servant, and my only only corrupt act-until Watergate. I did it for love. corrupt act-until Watergate. I did it for love.

I began to speak to Ruth of love almost as soon as she got out of the hospital and went to work for me. Her replies were kind of funny and perceptive-but above all pessimistic. She believed, and was ent.i.tled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren't nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they meant to do. We were a disease, she said, which had evolved on one tiny cinder in the universe, but could spread and spread.

"How can you speak of love to a woman," she asked me early in our courts.h.i.+p, "who feels that it would be just as well if n.o.body had babies anymore, if the human race did not go on?"

"Because I know you don't really believe that," I replied. "Ruth-look at how full of life life you are!" It was true. There was no movement or sound she made that was not at least accidentally flirtatious-and what is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on? you are!" It was true. There was no movement or sound she made that was not at least accidentally flirtatious-and what is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

What a charmer she was! Oh, I got the credit for how smoothly things ran. My own country gave me a Distinguished Service Medal, and France made me a chevalier chevalier in the Legion d'honneur, and Great Britain and the Soviet Union sent me letters of commendation and thanks. But it was Ruth who worked all the miracles, who kept each guest in a state of delighted forgivingness, no matter what went wrong. in the Legion d'honneur, and Great Britain and the Soviet Union sent me letters of commendation and thanks. But it was Ruth who worked all the miracles, who kept each guest in a state of delighted forgivingness, no matter what went wrong.

"How can you dislike life and still be so lively?" I asked her.

"I couldn't have a child, even if I wanted to," she said. "That's how lively I am."

She was wrong about that, of course. She was only guessing. She would would give birth to a son by and by, a very unpleasant person, who, as I have already said, is now a book reviewer for give birth to a son by and by, a very unpleasant person, who, as I have already said, is now a book reviewer for The New York Times The New York Times.

That conversation with Ruth in Nuremberg went on. We were in Saint Martha's Church, close to where fate had first brought us together. It was not yet operating as a church again. The roof had been put back on-but there was a canvas flap where the rose window used to be. The window and the altar, an old custodian told us, had been demolished by a single cannon sh.e.l.l from a British fighter plane. To him, judging from his solemnity, this was yet another religious miracle. And I must say that I seldom met a male German who was saddened by all the destruction in his own country. It was always the ballistics of whatever had done the wrecking that he wished to talk about.

"There is more to life than having babies, Ruth," I said.

"If I had one, it would be a monster," she said. And it came to pa.s.s.

"Never mind babies," I said. "Think of the new era that is being born. The world has learned its lesson at last, at last. The closing chapter to ten thousand years of madness and greed is being written right here and now-in Nuremberg. Books will be written about it. Movies will be made about it. It's the most important turning point in history." I believed it.

"Walter," she said, "sometimes I think you are only eight years old."

"It's the only age to be," I said, "when a new era is being born."

Clocks struck six all over town. A new voice joined the chorus of public chimes and bells. It was in fact an old voice in Nuremberg, but Ruth and I had never heard it before. It was the deep bonging bonging of the of the Mannleinlaufen Mannleinlaufen, the bizarre clock of the distant Frauenkirche Frauenkirche. That clock was built more than four hundred years ago. My ancestors, both Lithuanian and Polish, would have been fighting Ivan the Terrible back then.

The visible part of the clock consisted of seven robots, which represented seven fourteenth-century electors. They were designed to circle an eighth robot, which represented the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fourth, and to celebrate his exclusion, in Thirteen-hundred and Fifty-six, of the Papacy from the selection of German rulers. The clock had been knocked out by bombing. American soldiers who were clever with machinery had begun on their own time to tinker with it as soon as they occupied the city. Most Germans I had talked to were so demoralized that they did not care if the Mannleinlaufen Mannleinlaufen never ran again. But it was running again, anyway. Thanks to American ingenuity, the electors were circling Charles the Fourth again. never ran again. But it was running again, anyway. Thanks to American ingenuity, the electors were circling Charles the Fourth again.

"Well," said Ruth, when the sounds of the bells had died away, "when you eight-year-olds kill Evil here in Nuremberg, be sure to bury it at a crossroads and drive a stake through its heart-or you just might see it again at the next full moooooooooooooooooon."

3.

BUT MY UNFLAGGING optimism prevailed. Ruth consented at last to marry me, to let me try to make her the happiest of women, despite all the ghastly things that had happened to her so far. She was a virgin, and so very nearly was I, although I was thirty-three-although, roughly speaking, half my life was over. optimism prevailed. Ruth consented at last to marry me, to let me try to make her the happiest of women, despite all the ghastly things that had happened to her so far. She was a virgin, and so very nearly was I, although I was thirty-three-although, roughly speaking, half my life was over.

Oh, to be sure, I had, while in Was.h.i.+ngton, "made love," as they say, to this woman or that one from time to time. There was a WAC. There was a Navy nurse. There was a stenographer in the Department of Commerce typing pool. But I was fundamentally a fanatical monk in the service of war, war, war. There were many like me. Nothing else in life is nearly so obsessive as war, war, war.

My wedding gift to Ruth was a wood carving commissioned by me. It depicted hands of an old person pressed together in prayer. It was a three-dimensional rendering of a drawing by Albrecht Durer, a sixteenth-century artist, whose house Ruth and I had visited many times in Nuremberg, during our courting days. That was my invention, so far as I know, having those famous hands on paper rendered in the round. Such hands have since been manufactured by the millions and are staples of dim-witted piety in gift shops everywhere.

Soon after our marriage I was transferred to Wiesbaden, Germany, outside of Frankfurt am Main, where I was placed in charge of a team of civilian engineers, which was winnowing mountains of captured German technical doc.u.ments for inventions and manufacturing methods and trade secrets American industry might use. It did not matter that I knew no math or chemistry or physics-any more than it had mattered when I went to work for the Department of Agriculture that I had never been near a farm, that I had not even tended a pot of African violets on a windowsill. There was nothing that a humanist could not supervise-or so it was widely believed at the time.

Our son was born by cesarean section in Wiesbaden. Ben Shapiro, who had been my best man, and who had also been transferred to Wiesbaden, delivered the child. He had just been promoted to full colonel. In a few years Senator Joseph R. McCarthy would find that promotion to have been sinister, since it was well known that Shapiro had been a communist before the war. "Who promoted Shapiro to Wiesbaden?" he would want to know.

We named our son Walter F. Starbuck, Jr. Little did we dream that the name would become as onerous as Judas Iscariot, Jr., to the boy. He would seek legal remedy when he turned twenty-one, would have his name changed to Walter F. Stankiewicz, the name that appears over his columns in The New York Times The New York Times. Stankiewicz, of course, was our discarded family name. And I must laugh now, remembering something my father once told me about his arrival at Ellis Island as an immigrant. He was advised that Stankiewicz had unpleasant connotations to American ears, that people would think he smelled bad, even if he sat in a bathtub all day long.

I returned to the United States with my little human family, to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., again, in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. My optimism became bricks and mortar and wood and nails. We bought the only house we would ever own, which was the little bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Ruth put on the mantelpiece the woodcarving of the praying hands by Albrecht Durer. There were two things that had made her want to buy that house and no other, she said. One was that it had a perfect resting place for the hands. The other was a gnarled old tree that shaded the walk to our doorstep. It was a flowering crab apple tree.

Was she religious? No. She was from a family that was skeptical about all formal forms of wors.h.i.+p, which was cla.s.sified as Jewish by the n.a.z.is. Its members would not have so cla.s.sified themselves. I asked her once if she had ever sought the consolations of religion in the concentration camp.

"No," she said. "I knew G.o.d would never come near such a place. So did the n.a.z.is. That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the n.a.z.is," she said. "They understood G.o.d better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away."

I still ponder a toast Ruth gave one Christmas Eve, in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-four or so. I was the only person to hear it-the only other person in the bungalow. Our son had not sent us so much as a Christmas card. The toast was this, and I suppose she might just as logically have given it on the day I met her in Nuremberg: "Here's to G.o.d Almighty, the laziest man in town."

Strong stuff.

Yes-and my speckled old hands were like the Albrecht Durer hands atop my folded bedding, as I sat on my prison cot in Georgia, waiting for freedom to begin again.

I was a pauper.

I had emptied my savings account and cashed in my life-insurance policies and sold my Volkswagen and my brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in order to pay for my futile defense.

My lawyers said that I still owed them one hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. Maybe so. Anything was possible.

Nor did I have glamor to sell. I was the oldest and least celebrated of all the Watergate coconspirators. What made me so uninteresting, I suppose, was that I had so little power and wealth to lose. Other coconspirators had taken belly-whoppers from the tops of church steeples, so to speak. When I was arrested, I was a man sitting on a three-legged stool in the bottom of a well. All they could do to me was to saw off the legs of my little stool.

Not even I cared. My wife had died two weeks before they took me away, and my son no longer spoke to me. Still-they had to put handcuffs on me. It was the custom.

"Your name?" the police sergeant who booked me had asked.

I was impudent with him. Why not? "Harry Houdini," I replied.

A fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. It happened all the time.

"At least I don't smoke anymore," I thought.

President Nixon himself commented one time on how much I smoked. It was soon after I came to work for him-in the spring of Nineteen-hundred and Seventy. I was summoned to an emergency meeting about the shooting to death of four antiwar protesters at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard. There were about forty other people at the meeting. President Nixon was at the head of the huge oval table, and I was at the foot. This was the first time I had seen him in person since he was a mere congressman-twenty years before. Until now he had no wish to see his special advisor on youth affairs. As things turned out, he would never want to see me again.

Virgil Greathouse, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, and reputedly one of the President's closest friends, was there. He would begin serving his prison term on the same day I completed mine. Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew was there. He would eventually plead nolo contendere nolo contendere to charges of accepting bribes and evading income taxes. Emil Larkin, the President's most vindictive advisor and dreaded hatchet man, was there. He would eventually discover Jesus Christ as his personal Savior as the prosecutors were about to get him for obstruction of justice and perjury. Henry Kissinger was there. He had yet to recommend the carpet-bombing of Hanoi on Christmas Day. Richard M. Helms, head of the C.I.A., was there. He would later be reprimanded for lying under oath of Congress. H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman and Charles W. Colson and John N. Mitch.e.l.l, the attorney general, were there. They, too, would be jailbirds by and by. to charges of accepting bribes and evading income taxes. Emil Larkin, the President's most vindictive advisor and dreaded hatchet man, was there. He would eventually discover Jesus Christ as his personal Savior as the prosecutors were about to get him for obstruction of justice and perjury. Henry Kissinger was there. He had yet to recommend the carpet-bombing of Hanoi on Christmas Day. Richard M. Helms, head of the C.I.A., was there. He would later be reprimanded for lying under oath of Congress. H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman and Charles W. Colson and John N. Mitch.e.l.l, the attorney general, were there. They, too, would be jailbirds by and by.