Time's Betrayal

By David Adams Cleveland

Tapping into spy thriller territory, and the KGB penetration of American secrets by Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, the narrative unfolds through a series of engrossing, if agonizing, love stories that cross the boundaries of generations in ways both profoundly unsettling and deeply moving. Although Time's Betrayal is a literate genre-bender and suspenseful page-turner full of twists and turns, the novel is really about how family history shapes who we are and how memory -- the river of Time-- guides our joint destinies, testing our most cherished hopes, shaping who we are and what we believe, and teaching us that the essential truths of our humanity--freedom, justice, love, and honor--must be reclaimed in every generation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Nov 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944388157

David Adams Cleveland

David Adams Cleveland is a novelist and art historian. His latest novel, Time's Betrayal, is just out from Fomite Press. A Starred Booklist Review noted that Time's Betrayal, "raises the bar for multi-generational epics . . . the writing is gripping throughout . . . this unforgettable tour de force is well worth the time." Pulitzer prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler called Time's Betrayal, "a vast, rich,endlessly absorbing novel engaging with the great and enduring theme of literary art, the quest for identity." Bruce Olds, two-time Pulitzer nominated author, described Time's Betrayal as a "monumental work . . . in a league of its own and class by itself . . . a large-hearted American epic that deserves the widest possible, most discriminating of readerships." In summer, 2014, his second novel, Love's Attraction, became the top-selling hardback fiction for Barnes & Noble in New England. Fictionalcities.uk included Love's Attraction on its list of top novels for 2013. His first novel, With a Gemlike Flame, drew wide praise for its evocation of Venice and the hunt for a lost masterpiece by Raphael. His most recent art history book, A History of American Tonalism, won the Silver Medal in Art History in the Book of the Year Awards, 2010; and Outstanding Academic Title 2011 from the American Library Association; it was the best selling American art history book in 2011 and 2012. David was a regular reviewer for Artnews, and has written for The Magazine Antiques, the American Art Review, and Dance Magazine. For almost a decade, he was the Arts Editor at Voice of America. He and his wife live in New York where he works as an art adviser with his son, Carter Cleveland, founder of Artsy.net, the new internet site making all the world's art accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

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Prologue

FINALLY SPRING HAS COME. IT WAS A LONG WINTER climbing the narrow steps—all fifty-three—to my father’s boyhood room each morning, sitting at his desk while staring out the window at the pines over the lake, sifting, sifting . . . endlessly sifting the clues to his disappearance. Lonely, too, without a word from Laura these many months. But now I have almost everything: the family archive assembled by my grandmother, my father’s schoolboy letters to her, and his love letters to Suzanne Williams (hers too, sizzling my delicate fingertips), his books and articles from the thirties, his Pankrác Prison diary, the CIA investigation of his defection, and, thanks to Brandt & Harrison’s exorbitant bribes and the fall of the Berlin Wall last October, John Alden’s Stasi files. Not to mention the foxed manila envelope he left on his desk some thirty-five years ago containing clippings from the 1877 Natchez Weekly Democrat and thirty-odd Pinkerton reports. The newspaper clippings I saved from crumbled oblivion by Xerox. I have tracked down most who knew him, and loved him: the man who walked through Checkpoint Charlie in 1953, never to return. No doubt more questions than answers: how my father got entangled in the greatest spy scandal of the twentieth century . . . only to pull off the scholarly coup of his generation, a story to equal Schliemann’s.

---

This morning there is a milky gray light over the lake. Still a hint of winter chill, where the towering white pines reign like gods of first creation. My father’s room, tucked in under the eaves, is cramped, and the one window of leaded glass contains eighteen lozenge-shaped panes, so transforming the view of the lake into vertical prisms of swimming light. Not unlike the puzzle of a missing life glimpsed through time. Such a vantage point is a good place to watch for a change in the weather; a place to write and remember and breathe the smells of stored time in cracked bindings and mildewed pages . . . and wonder. From such a height, the landscape of our lives gives the pleasing illusion of intelligibility, the kind of neat continuity we archaeologists love to plot with a well-plumbed trench, strata upon strata layering out our story. As my father and Karel Hollar picked over the bones of Homer for clues to the mysterious sources of his tales. For when I look at the dissolving mist above the lake, one veil lifting to reveal another, I feel the presence of the white pine most insistently—time’s sentinels, keeping their watch along the shore as they did when my father was a boy . . . and his father and grandfather. Their cradling upper branches reaching skyward, dusted with first light, look much the same as when he sat here the morning of his leaving.

I often wonder if he felt safe here, as I feel safe . . . as did his heroes from their wall-girt palaces in Mycenae, Sparta, Pylos, and Ithaca— muted one by one as the Dark Ages descended.

I know he spent much of his last night typing—an inconstant Morse code in my youthful dreams—before stealing away at two in the morning to rendezvous with his lover. When I was first allowed to venture up those narrow stairs as a ten-year-old—or had I just turned eleven?—his room was exactly as he’d left it, except for the dusting of yellow pollen imprinted with tiny paw prints. The housekeeper had been instructed to leave it be. Next to the green Underwood on his desk was a cigar box and underneath it the envelope containing the 1877 cuttings from the Natchez Weekly Democrat and Pinkerton reports on the fate of Pearce Breckenridge. In the cigar box on a yellowed bed of cotton was the rolled-up skin of a seven-foot eastern diamondback: a freak of nature in the Berkshires. I was so awed by that snakeskin that I neglected the manila envelope, which I stuck away in the bookshelf and promptly forgot, finding myself drawn instead to the pile of well thumbed volumes on Bronze Age Greece and Crete stacked three feet high on the floor by his desk. Except for the dust and mouse droppings, it was as if abandoned minutes before. I was convinced as a child that my father wasn’t really dead, that he might return home at any moment, or that when we were back on Park Avenue after summer vacation, something of him might reinhabit Elsinore to make sure his stuff was exactly where he’d left it. And so I dutifully preserved that mildewed, note-encrusted votive stele of early scholarship on Linear B by Arthur Evans, Bartlett and Bennett, somewhat perplexed that at least seven pages of illustrations on the script had been hastily ripped from two volumes. For a worshipful bibliophile, an abomination!

Sometimes, deep in a warm August night, I would wake to the sound of tapping, listening intently in my bed as I stared out at the pine-silhouetted sky. I often found myself tiptoeing up the long flight of stairs, convinced it was not a flying squirrel under the eaves, and so might find him seated at his typewriter, fingers poised, gazing over the moonlit lake. For he, too, was a man haunted by the specter of lost stories. Over summer vacations, I taught myself to type on the Underwood—even its name transfixed me. The patter of the keys soothed me. I have always typed to remember. There were moments when I felt that if I could only concentrate hard enough, his voice, his story would appear on the page before my fingers. The feeling never left me that on his last day at Elysium he must have been weighing it all in his mind, the lake and the white pines and the possibility of a gamble with the destiny he’d been pursuing since childhood.

His best friend and CIA colleague, Elliot Goddard, author of the investigation on his possible defection, often speculated about his romantic temperament, as if he were a character like King Lear, disposed to shake loose all the cares and business of life in some quixotic quest for redemption. Maybe so. As did Max, our nemesis, who transformed him into a tarnished symbol of imperialist overreach in his first novel, Like a Forgotten Angel, to the tune of a million copies sold worldwide . . . and still selling.

As a historian and archaeologist, with serious skin in the game, I’m going to try to avoid playing literary games and stick with the carefully exhumed artifacts of a scholarly life, and a life in secrets, and so let them lead where they may.

Home . . . as they always do.

It was late September—the twenty-seventh, to be precise—1953, and he left about nine in the morning. I know this because my grandmother must have told me about it, though I don’t remember her exact words. Actually, a lot I simply overheard. My mother complained bitterly to my grandmother some years later :"I was alone—alone, on our last night together. I know that he’d arranged and squared away all the things in his boyhood room, the collections of flora and fauna, the labeled arrowheads, clearing his desk except for the typewriter, cigar box, and the contents of that manila envelope, evidence of an obscure crime involving his grandfather, the Civil War general: a bombshell of assiduous sleuthing by his mother that she’d dumped in his lap only days before. His bookshelves retained the disquieting gaps of the stacked volumes on the floor. He’d fixed himself an early breakfast and then taken the path down to the boathouse and stood alone on the dock, taking in the lake. He was a tall, athletic man with wavy brown hair, large expressive eyes—everyone I’ve talked to has commented on his intelligent eyes—and quick smile. He walked with a slight limp from the wound he’d received in Greece in late 1943 as an OSS officer working with the Resistance in Pylos. Women still found him attractive—wildly attractive was the phrase I’ve heard from more than a few matronly lips, though never from my mother. His CIA sidekick, Elliot Goddard, liked to tell me he was the most unselfconsciously attractive man he’d ever known—turning the heads of every disgruntled wife in our Georgetown parlors—and Elliot, being a ladies’ man himself, had more than a little experience in such matters. Or as Elliot put it with just a hint of exasperated chagrin: That’s what women were drawn to, his sexual innocence, that naïve obliviousness to his own attraction. Among his colleagues in the Princeton Archaeology Department, I’d detected a grudging reverence for his pioneering work in the thirties, an esteem tinged with unease about a man with money, fueling his ambition and precocious fame . . . always cutting corners on finds, the retiring head of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens told me, and, unable to resist a rueful shrug, added, but the only one of us of dirt archaeologists in the OSS who actually set foot in mainland Greece before late 1944. Somehow sweet-talked the Brits, don’t you know, who figured it was their bailiwick."

That spring of 1953—with the Cold War at fever pitch—a great blue heron had taken up residence on our Berkshire lake and was still feeding in the marsh grass along the far shore in September. As my father smoked a last cigarette, it suddenly took flight and glided over the stump-patterned face of Eden Lake, its reflection trailing behind like a drogue chute the instant before deployment. I have an image of my father intently watching that graceful creature take wing, seeing it circle and finally soar over the pine-serried horizon, even though I have no idea if he ever saw it. All I know is that my mother in her dressing gown saw the heron from where she stood (a glass of scotch probably cradled in her fingers) by the Tiffany window in the living room, knowing that my father had been suddenly called back to Washington.

When I saw our heron leave, I knew he was gone for good—the Agency bullshit be damned. Perhaps her disgruntled comment to my grandmother had more to do with contemplating his infidelities, real and imagined, than with the call from Allen Dulles.

Standing on the boathouse dock, he might barely have noticed the heron as he stared at the Williamses’ place across the lake, McKim, Mead & White’s glorious Hermitage, where, I suspect, his frantic lover and nemesis, Suzanne, fretted and schemed.

Whatever the case, my father was passing silently through a checkpoint on the path to one of the greatest fiascos of the Cold War.

As I tell my students, avoid speculation until the facts wring you dry. I know he lighted up at least four Lucky Strikes. At some point, my mother picked up the flattened butts from the boathouse dock and put them in an envelope, which I found in her top dresser drawer many years after her death. I have to believe he was trying to get it all fixed in his head before he left: all the years from his earliest childhood memories of coming up to Elysium; the fieldstone cottage his paternal grandfather, General Alden, hero of Antietam, had built in 1880; and, of course, the Winsted School, an Episcopal bastion of good breeding and stoic character, which the general had founded with the Reverend Samuel Williams in the same year. And there was his own missing father, a thoracic surgeon killed in the First World War. That much we have in common: missing fathers—the Telemachus thing, as Max disparagingly liked to put it: those empty gaps of clean earth that maddeningly refuse our entreaties.

I like to think he was inventorying all the conflicting memories, the better to pack his gear, figuring just which parts of his story he might need to draw on where he was headed.

Picturing him standing on the boathouse dock smoking Lucky Strikes, I find myself haunted by yet another tale compressed genie like in the manila envelope, the circumstantial evidence of a forgotten crime of revenge that—and I cannot believe otherwise—confirmed my father in his own plan of similar ilk.

And so the river of Time bends us all to its current.

At some point, my father had seen what he wanted to see, took a last drag on his Lucky, and turned his back on his family and the place that might have kept him safe and rooted in the world of his people. My mother told me he hugged me for almost a minute and kissed me good-bye. I was at the kitchen table, having her specialty, blueberry pancakes with Vermont maple syrup and crushed walnuts in whipped cream. She even smiled when she told me this: I left purple slobber on his cheek. I ache to remember. I do remember his smoky breath, the scent of Vitalis in his hair, the crispness of a New England fall in his voice, merged forever with the minuet of nocturnal typing. I remember that after a long hike carried on his shoulders, he would swim me out to the float at the swimming hole in the first blush of evening, kicking on his back, lifting me to the glimmering stars—deceitful authors of our destiny. But that final hug . . . no.

Whenever my mother made me her specialty, I would first stab the blueberries with my fork to make them bleed, as I still tend to do.

And so I have patiently sifted the physical evidence. Many of the answers now lie at my fingertips, organized in scores of neatly color coded file folders. And I have my own run of catastrophes to offer perspective. But I can’t escape the feeling that this place of refuge, the high fieldstone walls of our cottage by the lake and the sentinel pines, holds his secrets fast, as it does his memory. So, too, the high ivy walls and even higher aspirations of the Winsted School. Such places, like the strong points of old, replete with failed dreams and foundering reputations, form the bedrock upon which I plan to build my case.

For these voices, so long becalmed, have again led me back to our woods, where changeless yet ever-changing nature holds a mirror to my eyes, where I hope to catch a following breeze—a glint of sunlight, a shivering leaf, a telltale streak of ripples—of what made him. And what killed him.

Such answers that have come my way are alloyed with time and require the patience of the gods and a gull-eyed beachcomber. But where to insert the first shovel blade, when memory had not, as yet, taken its full toll? A baseline of clean earth, as we dirt archaeologists like to call it, before the famished hopes of mankind gave rise to such infinitely sad yet inspiring tales. As they did for Homer . . .

Before the river within was in full flow.

Part One - Winsted

Mother had always told me I’m his son, it’s true, but I am not so certain. Who, on his own, has ever really known who gave him life?

---

Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass his own home and his parents? In far lands he shall not, though he find a house of gold.

—Odyssey

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.

The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow while another dies.

—Iliad

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1

PAUL OAKES WAVED ME TO A NARROW STRAIGHT backed chair—the nutcracker we called it—in his spare but bookish study at Winsted, where at fourteen I was in my first year. The sultry October afternoon infiltrated in stealthy low-angled oblongs of sunlight through the six-over-six white-sashed windows. We chatted for few minutes, until he abruptly paused in mid-thought, lumbered up from his desk, and went to a window and squinted toward the football fields. Freshly minted hash marks shimmered on the tarnished green of late-summer grass like ghostly tethers. Something had caught his eye—football practice? Still too early in the afternoon. Perhaps it was the lovely bands of cigar-shaped clouds— lenticular, if I recall correctly, a moody mauve-cream against the clear blue. Then, pushing at his upper lip with the eraser end of his pencil, as if annoyed at the distraction, he swiveled, winked at me, and returned to his desk.

As I was saying, a man like your father leaves many rumors behind him. . . . He seemed to catch himself for a moment, as if he’d let slip an indiscretion. But of course, it’s only natural you revere his memory. A son—law of nature and all that—must revere his father.

It was such a weird expression that I couldn’t think of what to say. I guess so, sir.

I glanced over his shoulder to his trophy wall, where a photo of my father’s 1932 championship football team hung with many others. But pride of place belonged to two framed godlike figures hung at eye level: a signed sketch by John Singer Sargent for the oil painting of General Alden hanging in the library, and an inscribed sepia-toned studio portrait of General Patton in full martial regalia, with a long dedication beginning with To my spiritual adviser, Paul Oakes . . . As I looked at the faces of these two generals separated in time by a little more than eighty years, an uneasy feeling percolated in my mind: It had to be my grandmother, dead less than a year, Winsted’s grand dame and a woman who never left anything to chance, who was—somehow— behind this bizarre interrogation.

As if my interlocutor, too, recognized the awkwardness of the situation, a twinkle flashed in his blue eyes, jarringly magnified as he slipped on his bifocals and glanced down at a sheet on his desk. Old Ironsides, as many alumni affectionately referred to Mr. Oakes, was a legendary figure by my day. He packed a lineman’s shoulders and a bulky neck that threatened to burst asunder his clerical collar at the slightest hint of agitation. With a guttural growl to get my full attention, he began again with his odd questions, probing me, as if convinced of the thing to be ferreted out, yet unsure how to best throttle the nasty little bugger. He droned on about my father, what a great football player he’d been, such a brilliant classicist, a light to his generation. All to the good: Mr. Oakes had presided at my parents’ wedding in Washington.

I just wanted to hide.

He sighed and segued into reflections on the hateful years of the early thirties: Bolsheviks in high places, Klan a plague, Jew-haters . . . uncertain times for a young man coming of age. Again, he suddenly changed tack at my perplexed expression.

Any of the older boys mention your father to you? Sir?

He tapped his pencil thoughtfully and turned his head, the inflamed capillaries in his cheeks flashing like diodes.

So none of the older boys have been . . . well, overly familiar, offered anything surprising in the way of friendship?

Friendship—sir?

I think my scowl at what I’d misconstrued as a question about homosexual overtures from older boys threw him, and he shoved the tiller another ninety degrees.

Alden, do you consider yourself a good Christian gentleman? He fixed me with blue bullet eyes.

Yes, sir; I guess so.

Guess so, guess so—mean you’re not sure?

I . . . I never thought about it much one way or another.

In fact, neither my mother nor my grandmother had taken me to an Episcopal service in my life, the only exception being the annual Founder’s Day services in the Winsted chapel, which my grandmother—head of the board of trustees for over thirty years—had required me to attend. A matter of family duty.

Paul Oakes grimaced and slid a nicotine-stained finger inside his frayed clerical collar.

Prominently displayed on the desk at his elbow was a well-thumbed 1885 copy of the Reverend Samuel Williams’s Essays and Prayers on Christian Manhood. Samuel was my great-grandfather’s first cousin and cofounder of the Winsted School, a personage my grandmother rarely referred to, and when she did, only in terms of his ne’er-do-well grandson, Bobby Williams, who always elicited a mild snort of derision. Paul Oakes grunted again and returned his gaze to the sheet in front of him; I distracted myself with an assemblage on a nearby wall of wooden organ pipes scavenged from a medieval monastery. Captain Oakes had bought the worm-eaten things in Paris in the closing months of World War II—a carton of Camels for a thousand years of history, he always bragged. He’d been division chaplain in Patton’s Third Army. The organ pipes were flanked by examples of illuminated manuscripts going back to the twelfth century and some rather maudlin Rouault lithographs of hangdog martyrs he’d picked up from the print sellers on the Left Bank. Prominent on his bookshelf was his pride and joy, the complete works of Saints Augustine and Jerome, all in leather-bound editions, many in the original Latin. A framed bit of incunabulum in the Winsted colors of crimson and black leaned against the back of the shelf.

Non enim oportet fallaces commemorare fabulae neque philosophorum iminicam Deo sapientiam sequi, ne in judicium aeternae mortis, Domino discernente cadamus.

---

I began working out a rough translation of this passage from Gregory of Tours: We should neither commemorate the false fables nor follow a philosophy hostile to God, lest we fall into eternal damnation by his judgment. Alden. I started in my seat. You are no doubt aware of the recent problems we have been having concerning the sudden increase of scribbling on the toilet stalls in Osborn House basement. I have certainly warned against this kind of despicable behavior. So far, the culprit or culprits have gone undetected. But now I fear the problem has gone beyond one of simple defacement of school property. It has now become a more grievous matter, affecting the moral well-being of the entire school community. There is a cancer growing in our bowels, Mr. Alden, and if it is not discovered soon and excised from the living flesh of the school, the malignancy will spread and infect the spirit, corrupt the soul. I fear it is the thirties all over again.

His face had become livid and trembling, his voice like a broken steam pipe.

Mr. Alden, I have had one of my prefects perform the odious task of transcribing some of the tasteless commentary that has recently appeared in the toilet stalls. The list is of remarkable loathsomeness. I would like you to look at this list; no doubt you will be familiar with some of its contents. And then, if you will, I would like you to read it—out loud. He handed me the list he’d been contemplating from the start of our meeting. This is but the song of fools, but crushed it must be.

I looked at the list of aphorisms. Some were indeed familiar and most showed the sure hand of the master—the true Maxim.

Read it to me, my boy, in as strong and steady a voice as you can muster. I want to see if the voice matches the thoughts expressed.

Mr. Oakes grabbed for his Camels and quickly lighted up. I blushed deeply and began. I stumbled badly on the German in the first line.

(I quote this list in full for historical accuracy; it represents, I believe, the first recorded writings of Max Roberts and exemplifies the aphoristic style that has made his novels so popular.)

---

"Die Lust der Zerstörung ist eine schaffende Lust. Do pederastic priests lust only in their hearts? Without suffering there can be no God."

Job knew God was neither merciful nor just.

Jesus is all prudence and concern for personal salvation. It is easier to believe than question.

They dare to make the divine incarnate, to flatter with dogma, ritual, and sacrament—yet, they know not her face.

They are procrustean even in their illusions.

Beware the admonitions of priests, for they know their own temptations only too well.

Inter urinas et faeces nascimur—and that includes snotty Winstedians, too.

Christ is the son of Woman.

If God had wanted us in Vietnam, he would have given us slanty eyes and chopsticks for fingers.

I kept my eyes fixed downward, repressing a grin.

Well, he intoned loudly through a cloud of smoke, does any of this calumny ring a bell with you, Mr. Alden?

N-n-no; I mean, I’ve seen that stuff down there, but I didn’t write any of it.

Know who did? No, sir.

No idea at all? No, sir.

You’re a bright boy, Alden. Tell me, what does this little wager with the dark powers suggest to you—a common theme perhaps? What is the intention of our little crappy-assed scribbler?

I’m not sure I know, sir; some of the references seem pretty obscure. ‘Obscure’? His left hand pawed at the space between us, and I handed back the list. Why, right at the top here, the words of the hateful Bakunin: ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion.’ Could you believe such a thing, Alden? I don’t think so, sir.

Yes . . . yes . . . He nodded his head, and his blue eyes seemed to expand beyond the frames of his glasses. There is a worm in our midst, Alden; a demonic and loathsome entity that must be cut loose before it does more damage. For emphasis, a perfect smoke ring fluttered from his lips. ‘He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it.’ He raised his forefinger and shook it at me, reaching to impale the faltering smoke ring, a parlor trick he indulged by habit. ‘And the seed of the wicked shall be cut off.’ With this, he sprang from his chair and went again to the window. His face, flushed a moment before, seemed suddenly very pale in the sunlight, almost diaphanous, as if something of him were fading away before my eyes. When he began again, he avoided looking at me, but stared out the window and spoke in a softer voice, as if drawn to some ecstatic vision.

I can feel it in my bones: the 1930s redux. In your father’s time here, such radical sloganeering was rampant, though of a more venomous Bolshevist sort. He made a dismissive wave with his hands. A community, Alden, even the Winsted community, is a precarious organism, a living, breathing thing balanced in the equilibrium of faith and the total commitment of its members. When even a single member of that community fails to share his burden with the others, shirks his commitment or demeans the faith that binds us together, then the whole shebang is placed in peril . . . for the slippage may pull others under, too. We are all part of a greater community . . . for a man must choose the city of God, or the city of Man. We are all ordained to one or the other; it is the choice we all must make.

He placed a palm against the windowpane, as if longing to press through an invisible barrier. A man’s faith is forever tested by the darkness. And then, possibly touched by a change of heart, he turned a more kindly face on where I sat.

"When we are young, Peter, we think the world is the way it is, for better or worse, because it is. But it is fragile. He waved a ringless hand through a dust-fevered beam to direct my gaze toward the pair of warriors on his wall. So very fragile—the light and dark mixed. That is why we are forced to choose. He fixed me with pained eyes. When I was with Georgie Patton in the late summer of ’44, I was tending boys only a few years older than you, who’d faced down German 88’s; some survived . . . some not. I held their hands when they died; I listened to their last words and wrote their parents and wives. Life is full of hard choices. In the end, it comes down to a love of the spirit or love of the flesh that sets itself up as rival to God."

I was mesmerized by this sudden intimacy of recollection, how such a wrenching experience might be framed in theological terms, esoteric yet oddly touching. Then, as if embarrassed by his candor, he seemed to catch himself and turned his face again to the window and the spaces of undulating green, white goal posts presiding.

There have been many esteemed graduates of this school—your father and grandfather, of course, and General Alden, who turned down the governorship twice—dare I say, all haunted by the darkness. Many of our boys have gone on to positions of great power and responsibility; and yes, even now, two of my boys are advisers to the president. Their wills are not their own, but are subject to God and the faith nurtured in their school days. Upon their choices depend the safety and well-being of this country, if not the world. They fight God’s crusade in Vi-etna-a-m—he winced at his improbable imitation of LBJ—now that the Communists are entrenched in Cuba, in our goddamn backyard, no less. Let their example be a guide to you, Alden. He snapped his well-worn Zippo bearing the bayonet knife chevron of the Third Army (We will not falter; we will not fail), letting the large sinuous flame rear high as he slowly bent forward, a filterless Camel crammed between his lips. And then, through the pall of smoke, his resonant voice like the holy of holies: It is only natural for each generation to want to remove the ancient landmarks, which our fathers have set, until, that is, you discover the terrible responsibilities bequeathed to you. We . . . well, we were cold and unshaven and unwashed; our own mothers wouldn’t have recognized us: But when we entered those camps—oh, Lord, the hideous smells. Your father was with us then. When we saw what was left of those human beings, looked into their sunken jaundiced eyes. . . He bowed his head. They saw us as angels who had flung open the doors of hell.

He raised a finger, turning once again on a dime.

Listen, just be careful whom you fraternize with, son. A man’s friends make all the difference.

I sat spellbound: Had he just said my father was with him at the liberation of Buchenwald? Full details would have to wait until years later.

Mr. Oakes’s bull terrier came scurrying in, wagging its tail. Ah, Stokes, so you want a walk, is that it, boy? Want to go watch the boys practice—do you? He got up and came over to me and put his massive hand on my shoulder. Okay, Alden, that will be all for now. Can I depend on you to let me know if you find out anything more on this grievous matter?

Yes, sir.

"Good boy. I’ll be seeing you in confirmation class this spring, won’t

I? His grip on my shoulder went right to the bone. Yes, sir."

He went to his desk and got his copy of the Reverend Williams’s Essays and Prayers on Christian Manhood and handed it to me.

I’m sure your dear grandmother had you peruse the pages, but you might want to nose around in the relevant sections on Communion and tithing before confirmation class. He tapped the embossed crimson-and-gold cover. A little old-fashioned, I know, but surprising things if you keep your eyes peeled.

My grandmother would never have dreamt of such a thing. Yes, sir.

She was a great lady, Peter. I miss her counsel every day. She did so much for the school; we wouldn’t have all the Negro boys we have if it hadn’t been for her, and the foreign exchange students. And on that score, would you make an effort to befriend the blacks in your class, especially those from the South? Tough for them to fit in, unlike their more streetwise kind from Boston or New York.

Yes, sir.

Oh, Alden, by the way, I know you’re a bit new to football, but when you take the snap, don’t anticipate—it shows in your eyes. Wait till the ole pigskin smacks your palm. Less fumbles that way, and the defense is more likely to be drawn offside.

Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

"And Alden, one more thing. Nothing wrong with being a classics man like John, but keep to the style; do not put too much store in the substance. In this life, there is really only One author who matters."

Yes, sir.

He smiled. You’re—amazing, you know, the spitting image of your father.

I was halfway out the door when I heard my name called a final time. I turned back. He was kneeling by the window, petting Stokes, cigarette at a dangle, his eyes abstracted with the oddest expression.

You should’ve seen it, son. When your father—when John threw a long pass . . . it was like time stood still.

"You’re amazing," I muttered to myself, hugely relieved as I headed out. It was quite a shock to realize that my mother’s lovelorn ambivalence about her hero husband and my grandmother’s steely-eyed adulation of her brilliant son were writ large in the world beyond my immediate family. As if my father’s memory had suddenly taken on a life of its own.

And to think that Max’s jejune scribblings were the instrument of my awakening.

Even worse: that my physical makeup contained some transformative essence, that when brought in contact with those who had known my father, it had the effect of insinuating his ghost into our colloquy. The dark pool of family expectations in which we sink or swim is one thing, but Paul Oakes had so neatly grafted me into my father’s public persona—along with the founders of Winsted—that walking on water seemed the only prospect open to me.

As I stood in the October heat outside Osborn House, this dilemma weighing on my mind, I realized I had lied outright, not once, but twice. Due in no small part to Paul Oakes’s summoning of my father’s shade, which had triggered some latent code of honor, some vague loyalty—but to what and to whom?

I stared across the green sward of the Circle and wondered if maybe my mother’s dread-filled reservations about Winsted had been right after all.

"There are other schools, Peter. You can stay right here in New York—Collegiate will keep you—a lot of boys do, you know. You go up there, and the winters are long and cold, and they’ll all suck up to you and pretend you’re something special. Do you really want that? Now that your grandmother’s gone, well, we can go to the lawyers and tell them what you’d really rather do."

On the day we were supposed to drive to Winsted, she went on strike and refused to order the car from the garage. She was more spacey and hostile than usual that September morning. The night before, she’d stayed late at the Colony Club playing bridge and had blown out her usual quota of vodka tonics. I told her I would take the train up to Winsted from Grand Central and get a taxi from the Route 128 station stop. At which point, she cursed the lawyers, as was her wont, and agreed to drive and play the part of the dutiful parent. It was such a final defeat for her, the last triumph of my grandmother, who had died eight months before. Grandmother, in her role as matriarch, had treated my matriculation at Winsted as a settled duty of family honor.

And with crushing finality, a feeble finger raised, she pronounced from her hospital bed the last time she saw my mother, "It is the family school and what John would have wanted. You, of all people, owe him that much."

Leaving nothing to chance, my attendance had been stipulated in all the financial agreements at my grandmother’s death.

Mother was weepy and morose all the way north on Interstate 95, haranguing me in hopes of changing my mind while flicking away tears of frustration.

As soon as we passed the ivy-encrusted gates, three hours late, I was eager for her to be off. She was snippy and impatient and clearly in need of a drink. She eyed the other mothers in their casual summer wear and decided she was overdressed. Then she embarrassed the hell out of me as she let out a war whoop of a sailor’s curse at a recalcitrant bag in the trunk or a spilled carton of books. Not for nothing was she the daughter of an admiral. The other boys’ fathers, many of them esteemed alumni, took delight in showing their sons around, relishing the act of continuity as they passed on to their heirs the recollections and admonitions attached to their boyhood memories of Winsted. I was terrified of what the other guys would think—raised by two women! That was the last thing I needed while confronting my peers in those first days and weeks. Then, after I got my stuff stowed away in my cubicle, Mother suddenly made a mad dash for the car without so much as a word about the parents’ tea for new boys, much less a kiss good-bye—and off she went. Free at last, I thought with a touch of adolescent irony as I eyed some of the new black kids looking not a little uncomfortable in their khaki slacks and Brooks Brothers button-downs provided as part of their scholarship package.

My mother certainly made a spirited show of avoiding getting sucked into the machinery of institutional memory surrounding our family, not that she hadn’t enjoyed the entrée and social connections the family name—thanks to Grandmother—allowed her in New York society once we left Washington after my father’s body was returned by the Soviets. She hadn’t even bothered to visit the chapel, where there was a carved inscription in the nave to her husband’s memory; or the memorial room, where his name and that of his surgeon father (blown to smithereens by a direct hit on his field surgery in the Argonne in early 1918) were recorded on plaques of remembrance; or the new Alden gym commemorating his exploits in Greece—the last of many gifts from my grandmother; much less his class photos in the corridors of Osborn House. There was, too, the splendid library built and endowed by my great-grandfather, the Civil War general, railroad builder, and New York real estate baron. The stalwart portrait of General Alden by John Singer Sargent in his blue-and-gold Union uniform presiding in the reading room provided much comfort in my early years.

My family may have gone back to the Mayflower, and our early Puritan divines were by any measure a pretty ruthless and intolerant lot—two returning to England to aid Cromwell’s execution of Charles I, but even their Revolutionary War heirs (on my grandmother’s side), who fought at Concord and Bunker Hill, paled, at least in my young mind, in comparison to the Civil War exploits of General Alden. The minutemen fought for their freedom from a loose British tyranny in faraway London, but General Alden and his men of the Fifteenth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers—abolitionists all—fought to remake their country in light of a universal ideal of democratic freedom and fundamental rights, for justice, equality, and human dignity. They had been willing to endure fratricidal war on home ground, and a hideous slaughter on a scale Homer could never have imagined. All for a cause, so I would one day learn, upon which Winsted had been founded, or, more the shame, the disillusionment with that cause by the 1880s.

In the coming years, I, like a Buddhist monk spinning his prayer wheel, would make my silent obeisances with near-unconscious regularity before these family shrines to our better angels. For my mother, the sacrifice of one husband had been enough. She and my grandmother barely spoke, due to—according to grandmother’s cryptic accusation—her criminal and selfish act of disrespect.

On the way home after dropping me off, she was pulled over for a broken taillight and then arrested for drunken driving when she threw up over the officer’s ticket book as she tried to slip a hundred-dollar bill into the pages.

---

Actually, my mother had quickly learned a lot of my grandmother’s tricks about how to wield money and charm to worthy ends. Maybe not quite Penelope to my grandmother’s Hera, and certainly not in the same intrigue league as Suzanne Williams—my father’s Calypso—but no slouch in feminine wiles. That previous spring vacation, she’d shipped me down to Princeton for three weeks to work with a wunderkind classics professor she’d heard was shaking things up in the department. He would go on to write hugely successful novels and movies; his first film, set at Harvard no less, made him a rich celebrity. Mother knew my grandmother wanted me to go to Harvard, so she set about derailing that eventuality by getting me involved with all the brilliant classicists at Princeton: Why don’t you go to the Hun School or Lawrenceville? she suggested. You’ll be cheek by jowl with your new Princeton buddies. Her plan half worked.

And I correct myself: Paul Oakes was not my first institutional encounter with my father’s controversial reputation. My classics tutor had taken me to lunch at the faculty club with members of the Princeton Archaeology Department: I was treated like a spectacular new find just unearthed. Seated at the table overlooking Prospect Garden were legendary men in the field, who spent long summers on digs in Greece, one the head of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and at least two others had been in the OSS with my father: Stuck in Cairo and Izmir, Ayvalik, Candarli, and Kuşadasi, worst luck, with the Brits and Turks breathing down our necks . . . while our Lawrence of the Hellenes sweet-talked SOE to drop him by submarine in Pylos . . .of all godforsaken corners of nowhere.They were all kindly and helpful to a fourteen-year-old, scrutinizing my features like near-sided numismatists, and I may have even impressed them with my knowledge of their work, but behind the sun-weathered smiles and nostalgia and self-disparaging quips about blown OSS operations, the insider asides between sips of Chardonnay, I had detected an uneasy equivocation about their erstwhile colleague. Of course, he had outpublished them all before the war; he’d been on the cover of Collier’s, Our American Schliemann, who was racing at breakneck speed to shed light on the lost world of Homer. I heard nothing of this, only sharded insinuations about how he’d maintained his honorary membership in the DAI (the German Archaeological Institute) a little too long for the comfort of his American and British colleagues. How against all warnings and common sense he’d actually made his way back to Greece in the summer of 1940, after most Americans in Athens had hightailed it out in the fall of 1939 with the outbreak of hostilities in Poland. Damn fool business, and then driving an ambulance for the Greek army up north in Epirus when the Italians invaded, lucky to get out alive. Last Athens train to Geneva and Lisbon . . . before the Germans blew into town.

And yet around that table I detected a certain sneaking admiration curdling their amour propre, that one of their breed had had the gumption to risk it all for the Greece they loved.

I chalked up the professional sniping to the fact that my father had gone into Bronze Age archaeology, a field the classical archaeologists of that generation had always sneered at because they saw it as a black hole, empty of recorded history and bereft of the mighty ideals of Periclean Athens. Homer! Who the hell was Homer anyway, just some compiler of twisted genealogical trivia and half-baked myths. The finds of Carl Andersen—abetted by Karel Hollar—of Linear B tablets at Pylos in that fateful summer of 1939 changed a few minds, but not entirely. And then my father had foregone his chair at Princeton in

1948, the youngest full professor in department history, to take up the post of CIA station chief in Athens during the Greek Civil War. That, too, I suppose, rankled.

---

As I pondered my lies to Paul Oakes, not a little perplexed at my vague sense of loyalty and instinct to hold my cards close, I carelessly leafed through the copy of Essays and Prayers he had given me. My eye was caught by an underlined passage: and so let your soul float free on the river of life, the river of Time.

Well, I thought, I’m all for that, being of independent spirit and released from maternal coddling. In middle school, I’d been a star history student, a budding archaeologist, and habitué of the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek and Roman collections. Even at fourteen, I knew my history from the dirt up. But as I glanced from the pages of Essays and Prayers and took in the prospect of the Circle arrayed with its handsome Anglican Gothic chapel and sprawling neo-Georgian school buildings, I felt some inexplicable twinge of anxiety bubbling up. Perhaps it was the midafternoon hour in early October, the summer lingering on the cusp of fall, the air a muggy dullness, through which the ancient apple trees on a corner of the Circle sweltered in their garb of ruddy green. Little could I imagine the horrific story behind those bent and tattered veterans of how many winter campaigns, resigned as they seemed to Indian summer’s end and the sharp frosts of New England that would strip them bare of fruit and leaves in a matter of weeks. That moment of anticipation and awakening to time’s moving shadow still lingers in my mind, and with it the perfume of freshly mown grass and bruised apples, and the hum and beat of cicadas . . . summer’s faltering heartbeat. I was on my own. I took a couple of deep breaths and closed the book in my hand and turned impetuously, as if to the hailing of a welcoming voice, to the playing fields beyond, where the blue countenance of Mount Monadnock presided above the distant wooded hills. I was aware of a whistle and shouts and the slap of football pads as practice began for the varsity. Like a familiar tune . . . the rituals of fall training, the discipline and speed and agility . . . as they would have sounded when my father played on the same field thirty years before.

All that, by rights, should have provided a sense of comforting safety to a boy coming of age, from a family like ours, and yet a moment later a panic attack overwhelmed me with an awful vision: a wall of fire sweeping in from the east, incinerating everything in its path. I saw the trees bend and flame, annihilated in puffs of black smoke, the schoolhouse and chapel implode and shatter, our world turned to a charred cinder. I stood trembling. Had it something to do with Paul Oakes’s allusion to Buchenwald, German 88’s, his face turned to the window and the impending darkness . . . So very fragile—the light and dark mixed.

Of course, this was just the nightmare we lived with in those years in

the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, our youthful imaginations inundated with scenes of Hiroshima and the effects of atomic blasts on test sites, the duck-and-cover drills we practiced in our classrooms. As with my tragedy-hardened grandmother, perhaps my apocalyptic daydreaming was a gut corrective to resting on your laurels, which she always beat into my brain. But I’d like to think it was the budding historian in me, certainly the archaeologist, who soon discovers that nothing is untouched by violence. I knew as much from the Greek and Roman galleries at the Met: the bronze swords, helmets, and chest armor in the display cabinets retrieved from the burnt cities of Homer’s lost world. In my first weeks at Winsted, I’d discovered cellar holes near the Naushon River with the fire-blackened remnants of clay jars from the era of King William’s War. The nearby mill town of Winsted had been burned to the ground in an Indian raid in 1692 and its first inhabitants butchered or led off into captivity.

War had made our world. And quaint New England had hardly escaped. I didn’t need the nearby sprawling military base at Fort Devens to remind me: My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all gone to war—and none had been professional military men.

I couldn’t help fantasizing about what an archaeologist a thousand years hence would find after a nuclear blast, sifting down through the layers of ash . . . what would survive? Such preoccupations had stirred my father about the mystery of the Greek Dark Ages from the fall of Mycenaean civilization around 1100 b.c. to 800 b.c., when artifacts and written documents begin to appear again, and Homer composed the Iliad and the Odyssey from bardic tales and rumors of a golden age of gods and heroes. Four hundred years of total collapse, a near blotting out of a brilliant civilization: The recovery of its history and literature obsessed my father. Who, inventorying the bombed-out cities of Germany in late 1945 for the OSS, with reports of Hiroshima still fresh, feared a repeat, which that wall of flame would certainly have accomplished big-time.

Little could I imagine that my great-grandfather, General Alden, had been touched by similar apocalyptic visions, and so had spared nothing for Winsted, hiring Frederick Law Olmstead to lay out his school in a sweeping circular design, so as to embrace a view of quartz-shouldered Mount Monadnock, the nearby Naushon River, and an array of grand elms and oaks and onetime pastures, lovingly preserving the battered apple orchard as a memorial centerpiece . . . of which only he and Samuel Williams knew the full import. As Max wrote in his first novel, a landscape and architecture replete with symbols both blatant and refined, coarse and mesmerizing, to foster the confidence of a ruling class that its sublime sense of noblesse oblige fitted it alone to govern. How many dozen times on the back porch of Elsinore had my grandmother recited the tale, how on a summer day in 1878, tramping the banks of the Naushon River, General Alden had discovered the orchard. That fateful day, she called it, when he’d spied an old dilapidated farm on a rising hill above the river with a splendid grove of apple trees. Something about the apple trees—you remember now . . . something about those dear old gentlemen drew his eye. He made an offer for the whole kit and caboodle on the spot and two years later the place was up and running.

I tried to picture it, the ghost of that Revolutionary-era farm and tiny orchard, the haggard trees now the axial point of an expanse of manicured turf around which the constellation of the school buildings, redbrick Georgian classicism draped with foursquare Doric colonnades, was set with the precision of a timepiece. Across the Circle, as it was fondly known, the Williams Chapel and the schoolhouse with its classically proportioned gold dome vied for our allegiance, while presiding over the nearby playing fields, the new glass-curtained Alden gym proclaimed the competitive ideals that exalted physical prowess so dear to the Greek mind.

That fall of 1965, we were still safe—barely—our faltering youth regulated like a monkish order by the sounds of bells that echoed in endless profusion across the Circle, summoning us to wake, to worship, to study and athletic endeavors, and finally to blissful sleep; so cradled within the regularity of that charming benignity of cascading tones that none of us could have imagined the kind of human tragedies for which Winsted had been antidote. The sluggish waters of timeless childhood still transfixing our gaze, so steeped in the gentle aura of tradition and reminders of our righteous calling in the world—privileged sons of the New World that we were—that we could never have guessed how little time we had.

America was at the apogee of its postwar confidence, that broad meridian before the calamitous years to follow. Our fathers had saved the world from the Nazis and Japanese barbarity and were now saving it from communism. We lived in the shadow of heroes and crusaders, who in turn had come to believe in ways very different from those of their progenitors, a new faith begot from the horrific conflagrations that had begun in 1914, for which my grandfather and father had paid the ultimate price. These men of my father’s generation, then at the peak of their power and prestige, having put their own lives on the line as young men, were now preparing the battlefield for their sons in the far-off jungles of Vietnam.

It turned out I was far from alone in my apocalyptic vision. A dozen Winsted boys had played a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis from the CIA to the National Security Council. They knew it had been a near thing. It was they who had convinced my unflappable grandmother to increase her donation for the new Alden gym by a million dollars for the addition of a fallout shelter to accommodate the entire school: a blast bunker that would have done Omaha Beach proud, with eight-foot-thick reinforced-concrete walls. As one wag put it, who had presided at the dedication ceremony for the new gym: For a month the cement-mixer trucks were lined up at the gate as if it were rush hour at the Lincoln Tunnel.

That summer of 1965, Lyndon Johnson had sent in regular army troops to reinforce the marines around the U.S. airbases in Hué and Cam Ranh Bay. At night in my dorm, as I drifted off to sleep, I could hear the sound of Huey gunships and C-47 transports from the nearby Green Beret training base at Fort Devens. From TV sets in the masters’ studies, one might detect the muffled crackle of automatic weapons through jungle undergrowth, recorded on grainy newsreel film flown in to CBS less than twenty-four hours after it had been shot.

Harbinger of my fate alone in my class.

But for a few weeks and months more, we remained safe, and my vision of Armageddon dispersed as quickly as it had come.

I turned at a shout and saw the launch of a football from a moving figure, its grand trajectory rising, rising, rising—spiraling across the dull blue sky, the arc decaying, only to drop safely into the arms of another fleeing figure: two figures in motion connected by the flight of an aerodynamic object across space and time. As good a metaphor for the fleeting affections that bind the generations.

Time stood still, son; it just stood still. And there it was: my first lie.

Shortly after my arrival at school, I had found myself drawn to varsity football practice. I had been a city kid, born and raised on the pavements of the Upper East Side of New York, and so had little exposure to serious football, only the occasional game of touch in Central Park. But I was impressed by what I saw. And as I watched, one of the players resting on the sidelines (I would later find out he was the captain of the team) looked up and seemed instantly to know me. He tapped a fellow seated at his side and motioned in my direction. Then both seniors came over to where I stood and introduced themselves. They knew my name. They knew about my father’s passing records. He’d led two undefeated teams in the early thirties, and his passing and rushing records had withstood the test of time. He’d gone on to play at Princeton. They asked me how I was doing, as if they knew all about me—even mentioning some East Side bars they frequented, of which, of course, I was oblivious. They patted my shoulder and offered to help if I needed their assistance in negotiating the fucking ropes, as one of them put it. Was I going to try out for JV football?

Why not—why, sure.

With that, they led me over to the coach and introduced me. Unheard-of courtesy from sixth formers to peon new kids. Preamble to a sacred duty entrusted to them from my father’s day.

This encounter had not gone unnoticed. At the far end of the field, a chain-smoking Paul Oakes had taken up his lonely vigil with a leashed Stokes at his side. Ten years before, a boy had died of a heart attack during one of Oakes’s vicious practices, bringing his stellar career as varsity football coach to an abrupt end.

---

My second lie was the real thing. Only a week before, I’d been a couple of stalls down from Max in the so-called Great White Way, a long line of toilet stalls in the Osborn House basement. There were no doors on the cans, presumably to discourage furtive onanism, or worse, homosexual experimentation.

I was startled by his impetuous voice.

Hey, that your father’s name plastered on every wall in this place, John Alden the Third, the one they named the new gym after?

Yeah, I guess so.

Must have been quite a guy. I guess.

Is it true he was the greatest athlete in school history? Is that what they say?

I guess you play football.

I’m giving it a try.

The rustle of turning pages, a Time magazine he’d been reading. How better—an audible snort—to instill leadership and teamwork, the competitive drive. Do you play?

Not this Jew boy. I’m positively allergic to pigskin. So tell me, what’s the story with your dad—what happened to him?

I sat there a little shaken, my pants down around my ankles, as I was asked the crucial question in my life—for which I never had a convincing answer. So disarmed, I fumbled out the one thing I shouldn’t have said. It was not the answer my mother or grandmother would have given, but under the circumstances it seemed to have an internal logic all its own.

He was in the CIA.

I had spilled the beans, just like my mother when she got drunk. We were supposed to say he was in the State Department and had been killed in a tragic accident on the autobahn outside Frankfurt.

Ah-a, the plot thickens. A spy, a spook, a capitalist running dog. Fuck you.

Did he get shot?

It was an accident. A car crash.

Tough on you. I noted the hint of sympathy in his tone. It must be something, trying to live up to a guy like your dad—a real hero—a hero’s son, huh?

That shocked me: a hero’s son. Max had that devastating ability to nail your innermost vulnerabilities, often with a seemingly careless aside. Less intuition, I think, than the ingenious modus of a world-class snoop. Already he’d struck me as a canny outsider trying to insinuate his way into our midst, always hanging around, prying and plotting. Once I’d even caught him in the reading room