Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"And is she, the girl-is she with the Soviets, too?" I asked.

Winters shrugged. "Unclear. If Martin is really in this game, he might have shared his goals with no one. And then again-" He lifted a hand with elegant understatement. 'Anyway, we're a bit astray.

I stood. He offered to buy me dinner one night while I was here, but I doubted, after hearing this information, that I'd have the heart to see him. I remained vague, and said I'd ring if I found a break in my schedule.

Bad as the period before had been, Winters' news about Gita drove me into a turmoil that was even more intense, making my efforts to focus on the outer world increasingly tenuous. I walked toward Green Park and found, half an hour later, that I was still standing at the edge of one of the paths, with my hand on the cold iron railing, beleaguered by what tumbled inside me. When I looked in the mirror I saw a man of normal appearance, but it was as if that outer self was the backside of a moving-picture screen. On the reverse a movie marathon played, a never-ending splash of imagery and sound, all of it tortured. Often, as I plunged along the streets, I thought, I am having a nervous breakdown, and was propelled back to the present only by the panic that accompanied the thought.

With three days to go on my leave I packed up. Before I left, I wrote briefly to Grace. Dashed by Gita, I still could not rebound toward Grace. I would never explain why deluding myself about one woman had meant a death to my love for the other, but that was clearly the case. Grace was estimable in every way. But she was a piece of a life I would never return to. That much was concluded. And so was my time away from the service. Any further idleness would rot me. I needed work. I would head back to Luxembourg City. There would be cases to try. Men to hang.

But I sensed that even the drama of the law might fail to preoccupy me. If I remained in this abyss, there could be only one choice. I knew instantly and found not the remotest irony in my decision. I would apply for transfer to the infantry and return to combat. The desperation to remain alive, to kill rather than die, was the only reliable distraction from what was rocketing around my mind.

Only as I closed the door on the hotel room, with my duffel slung across my back, did the full import of my plans strike home, and somehow it was Gita who addressed me. I listened to her voice in the same state of fury and surrender that had tormented me for days, wanting not to hear it and hearing it nonetheless.

"You are Martin," she said.

February 11, 1945

Dear Grace, I have spent the last week in London, attempting to recover from what has transpired. After months of sharing so many impressions with you, I know how sparse I've been with details of the fighting. But there is no point to saying more. Imagine the worst. It is more awful than that. I came across the ocean, regretting that I was to be but a pretend soldier. I have been a soldier in earnest in the last months, and I regret that far more.

I now know, Grace, that I will not be able to come home to you. I feel myself damaged in some essential way I will never fully repair. I thought when I arrived here that love would survive anything. But that was one of many fabrications I carried along. For me, our sweet world has ended.

I know what a shock this letter must be. And I am crippled with guilt and shame when I imagine you reading it. But I am in a mood that seems to require me to cast off all illusions, and that includes the notion that I could return to be a loving husband to you.

I will carry you with me eternally. My regard and admiration are forever.

Please forgive me, David

For several years when Sarah and I were little, my mother would dress us up once each summer and put us in our Chevy with my father. There was a touch of foreboding about these trips, probably because Dad didn't take us many places without Mom, except for baseball games, which she regarded as permanently incomprehensible. It was summer, and Sarah and I were not in school, and this little automobile trip was the last thing either my sister or I wanted to do. Before getting very far, Sarah or I would claim to be carsick. But Dad continued, driving about twenty minutes into the heart of the black belt, proceeding through the most blighted streets until reaching a tidy block of three-flats. There he extracted my sister and me from the auto, notwithstanding our complaints.

Inside, we visited briefly with a soft-spoken light-toned black lady named Mrs. Bidwell. These meetings were palpably painful to everyone. After we'd come all that way, neither my dad nor Mrs. Bidwell seemed to have a clue what to say. In fact, even as a child, I realized that my sister and I had been hauled along principally as conversation pieces, so that the old woman could exclaim over how we had grown and Dad could agree. Race was not the issue. My parents lived in University Park, one of the earliest and most successfully integrated neighborhoods in the U. S., and they were comfortable socializing with black neighbors.

In Mrs. Bidwell's living room, we drank one glass of excellent lemonade, then went on our way. When I asked each time why we had to stop, my father said that Mrs. Bidwell was the mother of a boy he used to know. Period. I didn't even think of her when I started reading Dad's account because she was black, unlike Gideon Bidwell-yet another boat I missed.

Years ago, I broke a story about one of the supervising lawyers in the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, whose gambling habit left him indebted to local loan sharks. My source was an FBI agent who was understandably concerned about the perils of having an Assistant P. A. in the pocket of hoodlums, and the Bureau guy even showed me the federal grand jury transcripts so I could reassure my editors before we went to press.

It was a great coup for me. The only problem was that the prosecutor involved, Rudy Patel, was a pretty good friend of mine. Both serious baseball fans, Rudy and I were part of a group that shared season tickets to the Trappers' games. We'd often sit side by side, cursing the Trappers' perpetual misfortunes, high-fiving homers as if we'd hit the balls, and berating the players for strikeouts and errors. Bleeding for the Trappers is a Kindle County ritual and it became a bond between Rudy and me. I gave him good coverage on his trials. And then cost him his job.

Fortunately for Rudy, he got into an impaired lawyers program, enrolled in Gamblers Anonymous, and avoided getting disbarred or prosecuted. Naturally, though, he had to be fired, and was required to live with the ignominy of being outed by me. He ended up as a professor at a pretty good local law school and has gone on with his life, albeit with none of the promise that radiated around him earlier. I took care of that.

Rudy and I still live on the same bus line to Nearing and every now and then in the station we'll see each other. Every time I do, I can feel myself light up instinctively with the affection of our old friendship, and even see him begin to brighten, until his memory returns and he retreats into loathing. Over the years, his look of pure hatred has abated a little. He must know I was doing my job. But the fact is that there's nowhere to go. Even if he forgave me wholeheartedly, our friendship would be part of a past that he's both set aside and overcome.

I mention this because it reminds me a little of my father's visits with Mrs. Bidwell. These brief meetings clearly upset Dad. Driving home, he had a look of quick-eyed distraction, gripping and regripping the steering wheel. I don't know what illusion had brought him to the North End. That he was obliged to keep faith and memory? That by showing us off he could restore just a shred of the stake in the future Mrs. Bidwell had lost with the death of her son? But after the last of these trips, when I was about ten, Dad looked at my mother as soon as we returned home and said, "I can't do that again." My mother's expression was soft and commiserating.