The Blizzard Party

has lost her marbles? For mine, it is to rise, slowly, glacially, in fact, and shuffle over to the sofa. He sits down next to me and pulls me close to his bony flannel frame, and he grows to twice, three times his size, enveloping me in peace, and I cannot but help thinking that I am doing nothing more than transferring my tragedy to him, this lovely old neurotic catastrophe who failed at every turn to protect me from the onslaught of the world because he could not even protect himself. Charged by bulls, he threw books; beset by floodwaters, he built levees of paper. He told a joke that killed a man. He gave a test that turned out to be a suicide note. He was too distracted to save his own daughter from destruction. The catalogue of his failures is a heavy tome.

Neither you, he says, nor I, nor Vik, nor anyone, is a thought experiment.

Prove it, I say into his arm.

Impossible, he says, And that’s the staunchest proof I know. Proof by contradiction. I cannot simultaneously exist and not exist, ergo … How can I posit the possibility of my existence if I do not exist? Therefore, I exist because I don’t not exist. Except, of course, when I go to the post office. Twenty years and I’m still invisible to that woman behind the counter.

I have to go, Daddy. It’s sleeting.

Just stay here tonight.

Have to go, Daddy, I say.

Do you believe me when I tell you what happened in Poland was real? he asks.

Of course I believe you, I say.

You’ve read that story before, so you might be inclined not to believe it, he says. But it’s true.

I’ve read a version of it. In Slingshot.

The version you read was fiction. Now you know the truth. Do you believe me?

I believe you, I say.

And this business about a hypothetical life? he says.

I’m working on it. I’m righting the ship.

How’s that?

I’m rewriting The Blizzard Party, I say.

Are you? he says and sits up, his face bright.

I’m all but finished, I say.

Well, this is news, he says. This is wonderful news. When can I read it? Do I get to see it before you’re done?

You’ll see it soon, I say.

I hope so. What an undertaking. Correcting the sins of the father and all that?

A corrective, yes. I never did understand why you thought fiction was the way to tell the truth about what happened. Maybe I understand a little better now.

Are you sticking to the facts? he says.

I’ve tried to.

You’ve taken no liberties?

Maybe one or two.

And have you found that they grow? They’re like seeds, aren’t they? Before you know it, you’ve got a forest.

That might be true, I say.

We like to believe we can control the story, he says, or for that matter how we live, not that there’s really any difference. But we don’t. The truth comes when it’s ready. It hides when it’s not. Don’t confuse fact with truth. That book—it’s always needed you to make it right. You’ve always been the thing that’s missing.

The raven pumps into the spitting sky when I start my car. There’s a little choo-choo-train puff of smoke from my father’s chimney, the forest behind the house a gingerbread fantasyland of evergreens dripping with icing.

Back to the city, praising Audi all-wheel drive the whole way, the silver four-ring logo staring at me from the steering wheel, cousin to Krupp’s triclopean hoops, brother to the Olympic loops, chains all, methods of restraint—but these are only idle observations, distractions to occupy my mind as I slice southward toward the city, as I slide into the tollbooth lane, greened for EZ passage, as I barrel down the West Side Highway, hugging the river, past my favorite sloop, Ishtar, my signal to exit, weirdly having reappeared at its mooring in the dead of winter, and east to the Apelles. The city is producing some slushy precipitate mess, nothing worthy of being called snow, but portentous.

28.

Albert Caldwell was thirty-nine when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, too long in the tooth, and too well connected, anyway, for the infantry, thus inducted as an officer in 1942 and assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Discharged 1945, he was called back in 1947 to work on the “subsequent proceedings” against Alfried Krupp at Nuremberg. The primary proceedings had failed to win a conviction against Gustav, the family patriarch and head of the firm, whom the court had deemed mentally unfit, and the U.S. was bringing a new case, one in which his son, Alfried, was charged with four counts: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, use of slave labor, and conspiracy. Albert worked on the team prosecuting Krupp for using slave labor in its factories both within and outside Germany.

Albert’s discovery notes for Cecelia Goetz, the counsel in charge, were accurate, carefully executed, and surprisingly absent the condescending tone that crept into the notes of many of Goetz’s subordinates (men, all). Albert respected Goetz deeply, though his motivations were hardly noble. He’d never worked for a woman before, and never again would. He knew as well as anyone that back home no private firm would hire a woman, thus he wasn’t competing with her for an office in New York. This knowledge afforded him the ability to work calmly, with no concern for his own future. It was the only time in his life he felt comfortable conversing with another lawyer about questions to which he had no answers. He and Goetz endlessly discussed the intractable problem before the prosecution: What punishment could possibly equal the crimes Krupp had committed? Albert was adamant that a death sentence was far from adequate. What was a hanging? A quick jolt and then darkness. A firing squad? A painless moment of shock. A quick death was no punishment at all. Death should be a reward dangled at the end of a stick until the convicted begged night and day for it. But how to push a convicted Nazi to