At first it was an unspoken arrangement, a natural progression. For five years Gordon and he attended conferences together, coedited research papers, and collaborated on articles for the popular press. Eventually he began fielding Gordon’s cast-off requests for speeches and interviews. The old fellow’s temperament didn’t make it easy. But Nat persevered, mostly because the work was so damned exciting. Part sleuth and part scholar, he was always eager to track down the next lead, even when it meant forsaking his duties as husband and father.
On a snowy afternoon ten years ago he finally attained the ultimate level of trust and acceptance when Gordon took him aside in an off-campus tavern to confess that he was driven by more than just a lust for knowledge.
“Money, old son,” Gordon said tipsily “Let’s face it, the swastika sells. Always has, always will. Nobody did it quite like those bastards, and everyone still wants to know why. Hell, I still want to know why.”
Gordon had to shout to be heard above a neighboring table of undergrads, who were loudly discussing Simplicissimus, the prewar German satirical magazine. Or was it
“Stay the course,” Gordon said, “and you’ll always be assured of a paying audience.”
At one level it was disillusioning. At another it was comforting-Hey, you could actually make a living at this! So Nat and the old man clanked mugs to seal the deal just as a student shouted, “Doh!” quoting Homer.
Not long after that, Nat began receiving congratulatory e-mails, indicating that Gordon had passed the word. And so it was ordained: Nat would become America’s next great university authority on all aspects of Germany’s wartime resistance movements, small as they were, just as Gordon had been for the previous thirty years.
Then things began to fall apart.
The biggest problem was personality. Gordon Wolfe was vain, prickly, and abrasive, a bullish temperament to match his welterweight build. He was worse when he had hoisted a few, as Neil Ford would have said, and unfortunately Gordon believed booze was a vital part of the professorial persona. His daily regimen included wine at lunch, bourbon before dinner, brandy by the fire, and, if he was restless enough, more bourbon at bedtime. By the time he realized alcohol was a mere stage prop, just like his Dunhill pipe, it might as well have been stitched into the fabric of his campus tweeds.
Yet in other ways the two men were perfectly matched. Both could disappear into their work for weeks at a time, and both gravitated to the sort of research that shook things up-digging up the goods on a Kurt Waldheim, for instance, or discovering the shameful folly about some purported hero-a “gotcha” aspect that now seemed ironic in light of what had just befallen Gordon.
They also shared a belief that scoundrels, not heroes, were the driving forces of history, and thus worthy of greater scrutiny. The pop concept of the “Greatest Generation,” for example, struck them as quaintly ridiculous, albeit ingenious in its marketing. Even the self-infatuated boomers would have looked Great seated alongside Hitler and Stalin.
So, for every resistance movement or Hitler assassination attempt that had failed, Gordon and Nat wanted to know more about the weak links than the strong ones. Just as when a building collapsed no one wasted time studying the parts that
Neither would have been satisfied studying an era that survived only as parchment and tombstones, or tumbledown ruins. They needed a history that could still speak through the mouths of those who had lived it or, at the very least, through interrogation transcripts and frames of old film. Nat’s idea of a perfect afternoon was an interview in a musty Bierkeller with some aging soldier, spy, or diplomat. Meeting one of those relics was like coming upon a majestic old maple in which the sap of memory had flowed and collected to the point of bursting. Tap it at the right spot and you could capture it all. He had come to think of himself as history’s version of a sugar farmer in snowy Vermont-bucket in hand and earflaps down against the cold of ignorance as he notched the old giants one by one, before the last of them withered and fell. And what better subjects than the Germans, who were themselves obsessed with the past.
Early on, Nat’s hard work attracted all the right sorts of notoriety. Speaking invitations multiplied. Honors were bestowed. So was a book contract. The only colleague who wasn’t impressed was Gordon Wolfe. It was one thing to groom a successor. It was quite another to be usurped before you’d departed the throne, especially when your oldest sources kept telling you what a charmer, what a sage, what an insightful and indefatigable
Then Nat published his first book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Knights of Conscience, a slim, scholarly volume that examined a network of Berlin resistance figures and, typically, focused on their downfall. Its appeal was narrow, but reviews were glowing. Soon afterward Nat noticed a marked coolness in Gordon, but they soldiered on.
Three years later Nat celebrated the publication of his second book,
Gordon was notably absent from the launch party. Hurtful, but hardly ominous. Then the summer issue of the Central European Historical Quarterly landed in Nat’s mail slot at Wightman. His book was the subject of the lead review. The critic was Gordon Wolfe. Nat could still recite the signature paragraph from memory.
“The Gentleman Underground,” Gordon wrote, “is marked by faulty logic, thin research, and an overweening dependence on the clever turn of phrase. Perhaps blinded by the prospect of attaining a wider audience as a writer of ‘pop history,’ Dr. Turnbull has lost touch with the core values of his profession. Or maybe he is simply one of those cynical types who believes that because the swastika sells he can pawn off any half-baked effort as serious scholarship.”
The reception elsewhere was far kinder, but nothing could ease the humiliation of Gordon’s public rebuke. Everyone in the field knew its larger message: The king had smothered the heir in the cradle.
In the five years since, Nat had never regained his zeal or his balance. He still threw himself deeply into research, but more in the manner of an alcoholic on a bender, drinking to forget. His projects had lost their sense of daring, and in the intervening doldrums he settled for the snug comforts of tenure, lapping at academia’s daily bowl of lukewarm gruel at insular gabfests and conferences.
His personal life was equally uninspiring. With a failed marriage already in his ledger, he began settling for easy liaisons with like-minded burnouts, relationships that ended not in tumult but from lack of interest. His canceled date that night was a case in point. She was smart and attractive, a professor of economics. Nat begged off by citing a scholarly deadline, but now realized he simply hadn’t been up to the chore of discussing John Maynard Keynes in order to earn an invitation back to her place.
About the only positive recent development was that he had reestablished relations with his daughter, Karen, beginning with her enrollment at Wightman. They now spoke almost daily, and their friendship had progressed to the point that she was moving into his spare bedroom for the summer, with her mother’s blessing.
Gordon and he, on the other hand, had spoken only four times since the big breakup. The conversations were always via telephone, and always after midnight-calls placed by Gordon from well beyond the bounds of sobriety. The first two times a halting apology gave way to a rant. The third time he rambled on about the old days, one story after another while Nat lay in bed with the receiver tucked to one ear and a graduate assistant with striking legs nuzzled against the other. Half asleep and half aroused, Nat kept waiting for a punch line that never came.
In between he occasionally saw Viv in town, usually at the local organic grocery. She always waylaid him in the store’s farthest reaches, as if it were an operation she had plotted for days-reconnoiter the produce, lurk past the omega-3 eggs, then ambush Nat at the whole-grains bakery. She invariably approached with the sympathetic expression of a kindly aunt at a funeral, and chatted for as long as he would let her.
“Don’t worry,” she always said. “He’ll come around.”
Their last such conversation had occurred only weeks ago, when she had nearly admitted defeat, and for the first time had tried to explain Gordon’s behavior.
“I know it’s a cliche, Nat. But I’ve always blamed the war for the way he is.”
“The war?”
“The Gordon I knew before the war never would have written that review. And never would have let your estrangement go on this long. What makes it so hard to understand is that he still thinks of you as a son.”
