Herman Wouk - The Winds of War

“Let me have my say. I simply can’t bear the way I’ve involved you and your baby. I’ve never -”

“Aaron, I did it myself. Don’t rake it over now. Don’t . I can’t stand that.”

A long silence, except for the baby making loud sucking noises. Jastrow sipped the sherry, glancing at his niece with a hangdog expression. I might telephone the embassy, my dear, and ask if there are any plans afoot for the diplomatic train.”

“That’s a good idea, if you can get through. Otherwise we’d better go there.”

“I’m planning to,” Jastrow said, “in any case.” He made the call, but the embassy lines were busy. Pouring more sherry, he spoke slowly, coughing now and then. “One thing wrong with being a historian is the way it distorts one’s view of the present. I seem to see current events through the wrong end of a telescope. The figures look small and comical. The happenings seem so trivial, so repetitious, so banal! I can read the past fairly well, I think, and I also have some clarity about the future. Only in the present am I so dense. Hitler and Mussolini don’t have the resources to last, my dear. This gaudy shabby militaristic madhouse in central Europe will fall. Russia and America are awesome, and between them they will crush Nazism. The only question is how soon. Well, I’d better dress.”

“Yes, do that Aaron.”

“I’ll just finish my wine first.”

Natalie impatiently arose and took the baby into the bedroom to avoid a row with her uncle. She had no store of kindness left for this garrulous, vain, cranky old man, whose Olympian irony and willfully blinkered optimism had mired her and her baby in this peril; though in the end — she always came back to this — she herself was most responsible.

Natalie Henry had thought and thought about her predicament until she could no longer bear the self-probing. Where had she committed the fatal stupidity? In coming back? In marrying Byron? In not taking the German plane out of Zurich? In not following Herb Rose to the Palestine ship? No, something deep was wrong with her; she was in some ultimate sense, for all her apparent cleverness, a terrible fool. She was nothing and nobody; she had no real identity; all her life she had been floating like dandelion fuzz on the wind. She was “Jewish,” but the label meant nothing to her beyond the trouble it caused. She had had her first love affair with an intellectual heathen Gentile. She had married a Christian without giving the clash of backgrounds much thought; his youth and lack of learning had bothered her more. What a queer, random, disjointed chain of happenings had created this sleepy blue-eyed little living thing at her breast!

In the past weeks, Natalie had started dreaming at night that none of it had happened. In these dreams time reeled back, sometimes to Paris, sometimes to college, most often to her childhood on Long Island. Relief and joy would fill her in her sleep at finding that she was out of the nightmare; cold sinking sadness would follow when she woke to discover that the wrong side of the dream-line was the real side. But at least on this side the baby dwelled.

The baby was becoming her anchor to life. At the moment the most real thing on earth was the warm little mouth at her chest: alive, sweet, and sublimely good. Beyond it — in the hotel suite, in Rome, in Europe — all was squalor, danger, uncertainty, and darkening horizons. The diplomatic train was the very last chance. Natalie tucked the infant away when he dropped asleep, and dressed to go to the embassy.

“Ah, my dear, you look very well.” In the sitting room Aaron now reclined rather grandly on a couch, in the handsome blue cape that the Searles had given him for his sixty-second birthday, his best dark suit and a large bow tie. He was still drinking sherry.

“Balderdash. If I ever get home safe, one of my first orders of business will be to burn this damned dress, and I’ll never wear brown again.”

Waving his half-full glass at her with stiff jauntiness, Aaron laughed merrily. “It’s grand that you’ve kept your sense of humor,” he said, although Natalie had been quite serious. “Sit down, my dear. Don’t pace.”

“Aren’t we going to the embassy?” She perched on the arm of a couch.

“Tell me, Natalie, did you ever meet Father Enrico Spanelli?”

“That Vatican librarian? No.”

He gave her the squinting teasing smile that appeared in late evenings when he had taken too much brandy. “But I thought we all had dinner one evening together.”

“We were supposed to. Louis got sick.”

“Oh yes. I remember now. Well, Enrico is coming in a little while to drive us to the Piazza Venezia. He knows all the newspapermen, and we’ll hear and see Mussolini from the press section.”

“What! Good Lord, I don’t want to go there with the baby in that Fascist mob! What about -”

Jastrow held up a cautionary hand and began scrawling on a pad, talking at the same time. “Well, my dear, it’s visible history. Since we’re in a tight spot, we may as well have the good of it.”

The sheet he passed to her read: If it’s war he’ll take us straight to the embassy. That’s the idea. We’ll be out of the hotel, where we might be picked up.

She wrote underneath, Why do you trust him? They did not know for certain that microphones had been planted in their suite, but they sometimes wrote notes as a precaution.

Jastrow blinked at her, took off his glasses, and polished them with a handkerchief. This was his unconscious signal, long familiar to Natalie, of a harangue. Softly he said, “Natalie, do you know that I am a Catholic?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Ah, then you don’t know. I thought perhaps you were being tactful, all these years. Well, it’s quite true.”

Aaron often made odd remarks over brandy or wine, but he had never said anything this strange. Puzzled and disconcerted, Natalie shrugged, “What am I supposed to say? Are you serious?”

“Oh, very. It’s the family skeleton, my dear. I’m a bit surprised that they never told you. I converted when I was twenty-three.” He gave her a red-eyed, twisted, sheepish grin, scratching his beard. “It never took. I fear I’m the wrong blood type for that or any religion. At the time the act was sincere.”

Aaron now told her about a Radcliffe girl whom he had tutored in history and aesthetics, a girl of a wealthy Catholic family. After a stormy year and a half the love affair had collapsed. He had left Cambridge and finished up his doctorate at Yale, to put behind him the girl and his memories.

His conversion had been a very private matter. He had been discreet and stealthy about taking instruction, for many Jewish friends in Boston had been kind to him and he did not want to upset or argue with them. By the time he departed from Harvard, he had decided that the conversion was a mistake, having painfully worked his way to the skeptical naturalism that was his settled view. Thereafter, whenever the question of his religion came up, he had mentioned his self-evident Jewish origin and said no more. He had done nothing further about the Catholic episode; he had simply let it lapse from his life.

But he had made one bad mistake, very early in the affair. He had discussed it with his family. “That I’ve always regretted,” he said gloomily. “It probably shortened my father’s life — my mother by then was dead — and your parents certainly never got over the shock. We were estranged for good, though I once told your father that that phase was over, that I considered myself a non-practicing Jew and nothing else. It didn’t help. They dropped me.

“When the Book-of-the-Month Club chose A Jew’s Jesus , Louis did write me a stiff letter. His rabbi wanted me to come and lecture at his temple. He phrased it so that I could hardly accept. I thought his letter was cruel. I replied very warmly, but I declined. That was that. I never saw either of them again. I’ve only discussed this with one other person besides yourself in more than thirty years, Natalie, and that other person is Enrico Spanelli.