Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"However, in order to engage in a diplomatic dance in which the tune was our indignation over Martin's fate, it was essential that Robert Martin be portrayed as a great American hero, and certainly not a rogue agent. The inconvenient details about Martin's insubordination, the order for his arrest, and his many escapes from American hands had to be quickly blotted from community memory, which necessarily meant that the court-martial of David Dubin was required to swiftly become a historical nonevent.

"On July 26, 1945, I was called to Third Army Headquarters by Teedle, who informed me that the case was being dropped. He was forthcoming with the little he knew, but the General himself had been given only spare details. He was, however, all for anything that provided an advantage versus the Soviets. And from his perspective, the case against your father was far less meaningful now that OSS was saying that Martin had not been working for the Russians. Teedle was, frankly, quite chagrined by the about-face, and seemed to feel he'd been seriously misled.

"In court, I had learned never to question a favorable ruling. I thanked Teedle heartily and prepared to leave with the papers recalling the charges in my hand, but Teedle would not dismiss me. Instead, he came around his desk and bore down on me.

"Why the hell did he do this, Leach?' he asked, referring to your father. There was a tremendous animal ferocity in Teedle. He was not an enormous man, but when the General became intent, it was frightening because you felt he was on the verge of assault. It made for an uncomfortable moment when I had to outline the bounds of lawyer-client confidentiality. But it turned out the General had a theory.

"`I think Dubin was convinced Martin was not a Soviet spy, and was afraid that between OSS and me, the man would hang for it anyway. Is that close?'

"I knew I wasn't leaving without telling the General something, and what he had posited was true, as far as it went. I thought I'd satisfy him by saying his guess was accurate, but instead he grew solemn.

"I've long suspected this whole damn thing with Dubin was my fault,' he said. He was a very sad. man, Roland Teedle, fierce and thoughtful, but morose at the core and full of a sense of his own shortcomings, which he felt had led him to eagerly accept a false view of Martin. I don't know if you realize this, Stewart, but after the war Teedle went on to get a degree in theology and achieved quite a bit of renown in those circles. He published several books. His main theory, as much as I understand these things, was that faith was the point of existence, even while sin was life's overwhelming reality. Society's goal was to lower the barriers to faith, since faith was all that could redeem us. Very complex. As a warrior theologian, Teedle even attracted two biographers after his death. One book was completely unsparing-alcoholism, wife-beating, bar fights into his seventies, but not a whiff of the kind of scandal your father had heard about from Billy Bonner. I wouldn't be surprised if you checked your father's bookshelves and found one or two of Teedle's works there." In fact, when I looked, every book written by or about Teedle was in Dad's library, each, from the feel of the pages, well-read.

"There was not much I could say to Teedle," Bear said, "when he claimed the whole episode was his fault. It was consummately Teedle. The willingness to accept responsibility was admirable, while the egotism that made him think he was the motive force for everything that had occurred was ironic, at best. But on the other hand, the fundamental quarrel between your father and Teedle had always been about Martin's core intentions, whether Martin, in a few words, was a good man or a bad one. In the end, the General seemed willing to grant the point to your father, and with that finally let me go to bring this news to my client."

"Who was delighted, I assume?" I asked.

"Very much so. There'd been so much intense scurrying about once the autopsy had turned up that we'd known some change was in the wind, but neither your father nor I ever dared to hope the entire case would be revoked. David responded appropriately. He jumped to his feet and pumped my hand, he read the discharge paper for himself several times, and once he realized that his house arrest was over, he insisted on buying me a drink. I expected him to ask about his manuscript, which I had yet to return, but he never did. Perhaps, at some level, he was willing to see me do what I'd urged, namely preserve it for his children. That, at least, is the excuse I have given myself, Stewart, in sharing all of this with you.

"Your father enjoyed the summer air on the way over to the cafe, but by the time two glasses of champagne were placed before us he had grown quite somber. I was sure it was remorse for the many losses he'd suffered in chasing Martin, but that was not what preoccupied him at the moment.

"I drink to you, Bear,' he said, 'and you should drink to me. Wish me luck.'

"Naturally, I did, but he let me know I had missed his point.

"I must go to Balingen,' he said, 'to see how my wife reacts when I tell her I am free to be her husband."'

If you asked my mother, as I did now and then during my childhood, she would describe my father as the love of her life, the hero who, like Orpheus, had retrieved her from Hades and whose passion brought her back to the realm of the living. That was her story, as they say, and she was sticking to it. And I think, at heart, it was true. Despite the doubts my father expressed to Leach when he was freed, my mother remained loyal to him always, and he to her. There were the usual daily frictions, but my parents treated each other with appreciation and kindness. Whatever the other improvisations in their histories, the intensity of their bond remains an enduring reality for me. It was like the mystical forces that unite atoms and was the very center of the household in which I was raised. They always had each other.

My inch-by-inch discovery of the wartime travails of young David Dubin, so resolute, high-minded, and frequently unwise, eventually made some of my father's shortcomings as a parent easier to bear. Tenderness came hard to Dad, like so many other men in his generation, but I understand now that, very simply, he'd exhausted his capacity for daring in Europe. He'd bet everything on my mother and, having won, never put all his chips down anywhere else. The terror of the battlefield, the cruelty he'd witnessed, and the damage to his proudest beliefs were a weight always holding him a step back from life. Yet I grant him the one grace we can ask as humans: he had done his very best.

But the revelation of my mother's identity shook me to the core. How could she have done this? How could she have deceived my sister and me about our heritage? How could she have denied her own past? I barely slept for weeks. The world, as I knew it, seemed as dramatically changed as if I'd found out I was the offspring of an amphibian.

I had always accepted that there was an element of mild deceit in my mother's character. She was essentially a straightforward person, but she could lie like a champ when required. I was quite a bit older when I realized my parakeet, whose cage I had constantly failed to clean, did not simply fly away when I was seven. And she was very good at sticking up for utter implausibilities that she thought were good for us-like the alleged bout of childhood pneumonia she'd contracted because she had gone outside without a jacket.

But the autobiography she'd passed off was no little white lie, especially laying claim to the hallowed status of a survivor. How could she have done this? The words were buzzing through my mind at unexpected moments for months.

But time slowly began to leach away my anger. All parents keep secrets from their children. I eventually realized that neither she nor my father could have anticipated the abiding reverence the Jewish community ended up paying to those who had suffered in their names. True, that purported legacy allowed my mother at times to exert considerable emotional leverage over my sister and me, as well as my father's family, but she explicitly rejected any effort to celebrate her for what she had supposedly endured, always insisting without elaboration that she had been far, far luckier than most.