Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

The Germans still had 28omm railway artillery pieces in the Vosges elevated over Nancy, and once or twice a day the cry of incoming fire would ring out and everyone in the court-martial session would scramble into the cellar of the Lycee, waiting for the big boom of the shells. But that was no preparation for being bombed. The air seemed to slam shut on me, then opened briefly only to pound me again, while the earth literally jostled beneath our feet. I felt the shock across my entire body-even my cheeks and eyeballs were compressed. And the sound was worse. I had never understood until that moment that noise alone, even when you knew its source, could be loud enough to inspire panic. My ears went numb, then revived, throbbing.

In the instant afterward, I assumed the house had been struck and would collapse on us, but there was no sign of that. Instead there was light now. Eventually I realized that the wooden door of the cellar had been blown off. Martin went out first and in time called down that it was safe to emerge. Coming up into the daylight, I noticed that my boots were soaked with wine.

The crater of the bomb, the depth and the size of a small pond, had disturbed earth all the way to the house, but the actual point of impact seemed to have been about 15o yards away in the pasture. Everyone who had been in the cellar radiated off to inspect the damage. It was quickly determined there were no human casualties, although a number of those who had been near the cellar walls had been struck by falling bottles and several had been cut, including Biddy, who had pulled a shard the size of an arrowhead out of his arm.

Around the farm, the Comtesse's chicks and her one cow were nowhere to be found, and a horse was dead, keeled over like a life-size toy with his lips raveled back fearfully over his huge teeth. The family dog had literally been blown to bits. His leather collar was about a hundred yards from the house. I suspected that the blast that blew off the cellar door had been the end of the hound, who had probably been cowering there.

As for the little castle, the damage was moderate. All the rear windows had been blown out, and their shutters were gone. A piece of the roof had been ripped off like the corner of a sheet of paper. Inside, I saw that much of the crockery had shattered. For the Comtesse de Lemolland, this proved too much. She had withstood the death of a spouse and a son with dignity, and the destruction of her husband's chateau, but the loss of an old delft plate that her mother had hung on the wall sixty years ago somehow exceeded her meager abilities to carry on. She was on the wooden floor of the kitchen, her skirt billowed about her, while she gathered the chalky pieces in her hands and wailed in complete abandon. Gita held one shoulder to comfort her.

I fled outside, where Martin still searched the sky with the field glasses to be sure we were safe.

"Did they lose their coordinates?" I asked.

"Perhaps," said Martin, then erupted in a sharp laugh. "Perhaps not." He lowered the binoculars to look at me. "I rather suspect, Dubin, we've all had a greeting card from General Teedle."

Northumberland Manor occupied a large campus in West Hartford, a collection of white clapboard buildings containing various facilities for the elderly, everything from independent housing to hospice, and the several other stages in between as decline rolls downhill to death. Arriving early, I awaited Justice Barrington Leach, my father's long-ago lawyer, in the front room of the Manor's nursing home. With its wall-to-wall robin's-egg carpeting and nice Ethan Allen furnishings, the place presented itself as far superior to the usual holding tank for the barely living.

Given everything it had taken to get to Leach, including passing myself off as a lately orphaned only child, I sat there with high expectations. Leach, after all, was a longtime legal hotshot, whose skills had somehow allowed him to erase his trial loss and persuade General Teedle to revoke my father's conviction and prison sentence. Thus, I couldn't help being disappointed when a nurse's aide pushed the old man into the room. Overall, Justice Leach gave the physical impression of a fallen leaf crisped down to its veins. His spotty bald head listed, barely rising above the back of his wheelchair, and the hose from an oxygen tank was holstered in his nose. He had been so whittled by age that his sturdy Donegal tweed suit, perhaps older than I am, was puddled around him, and his skin had begun to acquire a whitish translucence which signaled that even the wrapper was giving out.

Yet none of that mattered once he started talking. Leach's voice wobbled, just like his long hands on which the fingers were knobbed from arthritis, but his mind moved along quickly. He remained fully connected to this world. To say Barrington Leach still took great joy in life would be not only hackneyed, but probably inaccurate. The Justice's wife and his only child, a daughter, were both dead of breast cancer. His three adult grandkids lived in California, where they had been raised, and he had resisted their heartsore efforts to move him from Hartford. As a result he was largely alone here, and he suffered from Parkinson's, among several other ailments. I doubt he found life either comfortable or amusing most of the time.

But none of this inhibited his intense curiosity about human beings. He was a gentle wit, and full of a generous acceptance for people's foibles as well as reverent wonder at our triumphs. I come easily to envy, but with Barrington Leach, when I mused, as I always did, about why I couldn't be more like him, it was with pure admiration. He was inspiring.

My first order of business with Leach was to set the record straight, not about my mother and sister, naturally, but rather about what to call me. He had written to me as "Mr. Dubin," but in 1970, I had reverted to the name my grandfather had brought from Russia and have been known as Stewart Dubinsky throughout my adult life. The story of that change, too involved to repeat here now, made a fairly poignant introduction to my relations with my father. Leach asked several searching questions before going on to inquiries about my work, my parents, and the course of my father's life. He was so precise, and cautious in a way, that I feared at first that he knew I'd lied about Mom, but it turned out he had something else in mind.

"You know, Stewart, I think you mean to honor your father's memory, but I would be remiss if I didn't issue a caveat. If you go forward, you could very well discover things that a loyal son might not enjoy finding out. I've always believed there is great wisdom in the saying that one must be careful what to wish for."

I assured him I had reflected about this. After hanging around courtrooms for a couple of decades, I knew that the odds were that my father had been convicted of a serious crime for a reason.

"Well, that's a good start," Leach said. "But the particulars are always worse than the general idea. And that assumes you even have a general idea. You may find, Stewart, you've been running headlong with blinders."

I told him I was resolute. Whatever happened, I wanted to know.

"Well, that's one problem," said Leach.

"What are the others, Justice?"

"Bear' is fine." I was never sure if the nickname had to do with his physique as a young man-he was anything but bearlike now-or, more likely, was merely a convenient shortening of his given name, adopted in an era when being 'Bare' would have been too risque. "I confess that I've spent quite a bit of time, Stewart, since you contacted me, wondering what call I have to tell you any of this. I feel a good deal of fondness for David, even today. He was a fine young man, articulate, thoughtful. And it was his wish not to speak about this with anyone, a wish he apparently maintained throughout his life.