Mother Night

  His dental work was of a high order, so the faculty hoped to see him outgrow his political interpretations of teeth. But his case grew worse, until his examinations became frantic pamphlets, warning all Protestant Anglo-Saxons to unite against Jewish-Negro domination.

  When Jones began to detect proof of degeneracy in the teeth of Catholics and Unitarians, and when five loaded pistols and a bayonet were found under his mattress, Jones was finally given the old heave-ho.

  Jones' parents disowned him, which is something my parents never quite did to me.

  Penniless, Jones found work as an apprentice embalmer in the Scharff Brothers Funeral Home in Pittsburgh. He became manager of the home within two years. A year after that, he married the widowed owner, Hattie Scharff. Hattie was fifty-eight at the time, and Jones was twenty-four. The many investigators into Jones' life, unfriendly investigators almost to a man, have been bound to conclude that Jones really loved his Hattie. The marriage, which endured until the death of Hattie in 1928, was a happy one.

  In fact, it was so happy, so whole, so self-sufficient a nation of two that Jones did almost nothing during that time by way of alerting the Anglo-Saxons. He seems to have been content to confine his remarks on racial matters to workroom jests about certain cadavers, jests that would have seemed workaday in the most liberal of embalming establishments. And the years were golden, not only emotionally and financially, but creatively as well. Working with a chemist named Dr. Lomar Horthy, Jones developed Viverine, an embalming fluid, and Gingiva-Tru, a wonderfully life-like, gum-simulating substance for false teeth.

  When Jones' wife died, Jones felt the need to be reborn. He was reborn a thing he had been latently all along. Jones became the sort of racial agitator who is spoken of as having crawled out from under a rock. Jones crawled out from under his rock in 1928. He sold his funeral home for eighty-four thousand dollars, and he founded The White Christian Minuteman.

  Jones was wiped out by the stock market crash in 1929. His paper suspended publication after fourteen issues. The fourteen issues had been mailed free to every person in Who's Who. The only illustrations were photographs and diagrams of teeth, and every article was an explanation of some current events in terms of Jones' theories about dentition and race.

  In the next-to-the-last issue, Jones billed himself on the masthead as, "Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S."

  Penniless again, now forty years of age, Jones answered an ad in a funeral-home trade journal. An embalming school in Little Rock, Arkansas, needed a president. The ad was signed by the widow of the former president and owner.

  Jones got the job, and the widow, too. The widow's name was Mary Alice Shoup. She was sixty-eight when Jones married her.

  And Jones again became a devoted husband, a happy, whole, and quiet man.

  The school he headed was named, straightforwardly enough, The Little Rock School of Embalming. It was losing eight thousand dollars a year. Jones took it out of the high-overhead field of embalming education, sold its real estate, and had it rechartered as The Western Hemisphere University of the Bible. The university held no classes, taught nothing, did all its business by mail. Its business was the awarding of doctorates in the field of divinity, framed and under glass, for eighty dollars a throw.

  And Jones helped himself to a W.H.U.B. degree, out of open stock, so to speak. When his second wife died, when he brought out The White Christian Minuteman again, he appeared on the masthead as, "The Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D."

  And he wrote and published at his own expense a book that combined not only dentistry and theology, but the fine arts as well. The name of the book was Christ Was Not a Jew. He proved his point by reproducing in the book fifty famous paintings of Jesus. According to Jones, not one painting showed Jewish jaws or teeth.

  The first issues in the new series of The White Christian Minuteman were as unreadable as those of the old series. But then a miracle happened. The Minuteman jumped from four pages to eight. The make-up, the typography and the paper became snappy and handsome. Dental diagrams were replaced by newsy photographs, and the pages crackled with datelines and bylines from all over the world.

  The explanation was simple--and obvious. Jones had been recruited and financed as a propaganda agent for Hitler's then-rising Third German Reich. Jones' news, photographs, cartoons and editorials were coming straight from the Nazi propaganda mills in Erfurt, Germany.

  It is quite possible, incidentally, that much of his more scurrilous material was written by me.

  Jones continued as a German propaganda agent even after the United States of America entered the Second World War. He wasn't arrested until July in 1942, when he was indicted with twenty-seven others for:

  Conspiring to destroy the morale and faith and confidence of the members of the military and naval forces of the United States and the people of the United States in their public officials and republican form of government; conspiring to seize upon and use and misuse the right of freedom of speech and of the press to spread their disloyal doctrines, intending and believing that any nation allowing its people the right of freedom of speech is powerless to defend itself against enemies masquerading as patriotic; and seeking to obstruct, impede, break down and destroy the proper functioning of its republican form of government under the guise of honest criticism; conspiring to render the Government of the United States bereft of the faith and confidence of the members of the military and naval forces and of the people, and thereby render that government powerless to defend the nation or the people against armed attack from without or treachery from within.

  Jones was convicted. He was sentenced to fourteen years, served eight. When he was freed from Atlanta in 1950, he was a wealthy man. Viverine, his embalming fluid, and Gingiva-Tru, his counterfeit gum substance for false teeth, had both come to dominate their respective markets.

  In 1955, he resumed publication of The White Christian Minuteman.

  Five years after that, a lively elder statesman of seventy-one, an alert old man with no regrets, the Reverend Doctor Lionel J.D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D., paid me a call.

  Why should I have honored him with such a full-dress biography?

  In order to contrast with myself a race-baiter who is ignorant and insane. I am neither ignorant nor insane.

  Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones. I knew it.

  God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.

  14

  VIEW DOWN A

  STAIRWELL ...

  JONES PAID ME a call a week after I found out how upsetting the contents of my mailbox had become. I tried to call on him first. He published his vile newspaper only a few blocks away from my attic, and I went there to beg him to retract the story.

  He was not in.

  When I got home, there was plenty of new mail in my mailbox, almost all of it from subscribers to The White Christian Minuteman. The common theme was that I was not alone, was not friendless. A woman in Mount Vernon, New York, told me there was a throne in Heaven for me. A man in Norfolk said I was the new Patrick Henry. A woman in St. Paul sent me two dollars to continue my good work. She apologized. She said that was all the money she had. A man in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, asked me why I didn't get out of Jew York and come live in God's country.

  I didn't have any idea how Jones had found out about me.

  Kraft claimed to be mystified, too. He wasn't really mystified. He had written to Jones as an anonymous fellow-patriot, telling him the glad news that I was alive. He had also asked that Jones send a complimentary copy of his great paper to Bernard B. O'Hare of the Francis X. Donovan Post of the American Legion.

  Kraft had plans for me.

  And he was, at the very same time, doing a portrait of me that surely showed more sympathetic insight into me, more intuitive affection than could ever have been produced by a wish to fool a boob.

  I was sitting for the portrait when Jones came calling. Kraft had spilled a quart of tu
rpentine. I opened the door to get rid of the fumes.

  And a very strange chant came floating up the stairwell and through the open door.

  I went out onto the landing outside the door, looked down the oak and plaster snail of the stairwell. All I could see was the hands of four persons--hands moving up the bannister.

  The group was composed of Jones and three friends.

  The curious chant went with the advance of the hands. The hands would move about four feet up the bannister, stop, and then the chant would come.

  The chant was a panted count to twenty. Two of Jones' party, his bodyguard and his male secretary, had very bad hearts. To keep their poor old hearts from bursting, they were pausing every few steps, timing their rests by counting to twenty.

  Jones' bodyguard was August Krapptauer, former Vice-Bundesfuehrer of the German-American Bund. Krapptauer was sixty-three, had done eleven years in Atlanta, was about to drop dead. But he still looked garishly boyish, as though he went to a mortuary cosmetologist regularly. The greatest achievement of his life was the arrangement of a joint meeting of the Bund and the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey in 1940. At that meeting, Krapptauer declared that the Pope was a Jew and that the Jews held a fifteen-million-dollar mortgage on the Vatican. A change of Popes and eleven years in a prison laundry had not changed his mind.

  Jones' secretary was an unfrocked Paulist Father named Patrick Keeley. "Father Keeley," as his employer still called him, was seventy-three. He was a drunk. He had, before the Second World War, been chaplain of a Detroit gun club which, as later came out, had been organized by agents of Nazi Germany. The dream of the club, apparently, was to shoot the Jews. One of Father Keeley's prayers at a club meeting was taken down by a newspaper reporter, was printed in full the next morning. The prayer appealed to so vicious and bigoted a God that it attracted the astonished attention of Pope Pius XI.

  Keeley was unfrocked, and Pope Pius sent a long letter to the American Hierarchy in which he said, among other things: "No true Catholic will take part in the persecution of his Jewish compatriots. A blow against the Jews is a blow against our common humanity."

  Keeley never went to prison, though many of his close friends did. While his friends enjoyed steam heat, clean beds and regular meals at government expense, Keeley shivered and itched and starved and drank himself blind on skid rows across the land. He would have been on a skid row still, or in a pauper's grave, if Jones and Krapptauer hadn't found and rescued him.

  Keeley's famous prayer, incidentally, was a paraphrase of a satiric poem I had composed and delivered on short wave before. And, while I am setting the record straight as to my contributions to literature, may I point out that Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer's claims about the Pope and the mortgage on the Vatican were my inventions, too.

  So up the stairs these people came to see me, chanting, "One, two, three, four. ..."

  And, slow as their progress was, the fourth member of the party lagged far behind.

  The fourth member was a woman. All I could see of her was her pale and ringless hand.

  The hand of Jones was in the lead. It glittered with rings like the hand of a Byzantine prince. An inventory of the jewelry on that hand would have revealed two wedding rings, a star-sapphire presented to him by the Mothers' Auxiliary of the Paul Revere Association of Militant Gentiles in 1940, a diamond swastika on an onyx field presented to him in 1939 by Baron Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, then German Consul General of San Francisco, and an American eagle carved in jade and mounted in silver, a piece of Japanese craftsmanship, a present from Robert Sterling Wilson. Wilson was "The Black Fuehrer of Harlem," a colored man who went to prison in 1942 as a Japanese spy.

  The jewelled hand of Jones left the bannister. Jones cantered back down the stairs to the woman, said things to her I couldn't understand. And then up he came again, a remarkably sound-winded septuagenarian.

  He came face to face with me, and he smiled showing me snow-white teeth set in Gingiva-Tru. "Campbell?" he said, only a little out of breath.

  "Yes," I said.

  "My name is Dr. Jones. I have a surprise for you," he said.

  "I've already seen your paper," I said. "No--not the paper," he said. "A bigger surprise than that."

  Father Keeley and Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer now came into view, wheezing, counting to twenty in shattered whispers.

  "An even bigger surprise?" I said, preparing to square him away so savagely that he would never think of me as one of his own kind again.

  "The woman I've brought with me--" he said.

  "What about her?" I said.

  "She's your wife," he said.

  "I got in touch with her--" said Jones, "and she begged me not to tell you about her. She insisted it had to be like this, with her just walking in without any warning."

  "So I could see for myself if there was still room for me in your life," said Helga. "If there is no room, I will simply say goodbye again, disappear, and never bother you again."

  15

  THE TIME MACHINE ...

  IF THE PALE, ringless hand on the railing below was the hand of my Helga, it was the hand of a woman forty-five years old. It was the hand of a middle-aged woman who had been a prisoner of the Russians for sixteen years, if the hand was Helga's.

  It was inconceivable that my Helga could still be lovely and gay.

  If Helga had survived the Russian attack on the Crimea, had eluded all the crawling, booming, whistling, buzzing, creeping, clanking, bounding, chattering toys of war that killed quickly, a slower doom, a doom that killed like leprosy, had surely awaited her. There was no need for me to guess at the doom. It was well-known, uniformly applied to all women prisoners on the Russian front--was part of the ghastly routine of any thoroughly modern, thoroughly scientific, thoroughly asexual nation at thoroughly modern war.

  If my Helga had survived the battle, her captors had surely prodded her with gun muzzles into a labor gang. They had surely shepherded her into one of Mother Russia's countless huddles of squinting, lumpy, hopeless, grubbing ragbags--had surely made of my Helga a digger of root crops in frosty fields, a lead-footed, splay-fingered clearer of rubble, a nameless, sexless dragger of noisy carts.

  "My wife?" I said to Jones. "I don't believe you."

  "It's easy enough to prove I'm a liar, if I am a liar," he said pleasantly. "Have a look for yourself."

  My pace down the stairs was firm and regular.

  Now I saw the woman.

  She smiled up at me, raising her chin so as to show her features frankly, clearly.

  Her hair was snow-white.

  Aside from that, she was my Helga untouched by time.

  Aside from that, she was as lithe and blooming as my Helga had been on our wedding night.

  16

  A WELL-PRESERVED

  WOMAN ...

  WE CRIED, like babies, wrestled each other up the stairs to my attic.

  As we passed Father Keeley and Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, I saw that Keeley was crying. Krapptauer stood at attention, honoring the idea of an Anglo-Saxon family. Jones, further up the stairs, was radiant with pleasure in the miracle he had worked. He rubbed and rubbed his jewelled hands.

  "My--my wife," I said to my old friend Kraft, as Helga and I entered my attic.

  And Kraft, trying to keep from crying, chewed the bit of his cold corncob pipe in two. He never did quite cry, but he was close to doing it--genuinely close to doing it, I think.

  Jones, Krapptauer and Keeley followed us in. "How is it," I said to Jones, "that it's you who gives me back my wife?"

  "A fantastic coincidence--" said Jones. "One day I learned that you were still alive. A month later I learned that your wife was still alive. What can I call a coincidence like that but the Hand of God?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "My paper has a small circulation in West Germany," said Jones. "One of my subscribers read about you, and he sent me a cable. He asked me if I knew your wife had just turned up as a refugee in Wes
t Berlin."

  "Why didn't he cable me?" I said. I turned to Helga.

  "Sweetheart--" I said in German, "why didn't you cable me?"

  "We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that."

  "My life is nothing but room for you," I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you."

  "So much to say, so much to tell--" she said, melting against me. I looked down on her wonderingly. Her skin was soft and clear. She was amazingly well-preserved for a woman of forty-five.

  What made her state of preservation even more remarkable was the story she now told of how she had spent the past fifteen years.

  She was captured and raped in the Crimea, she said. She was shipped to the Ukraine by boxcar, was put to work in a labor gang.

  "We were stumbling sluts," she said, "married to mud. When the war was over, nobody bothered to tell us. Our tragedy was permanent. No records were kept of us anywhere. We shuffled through ruined villages aimlessly. Anyone who had a menial, pointless job to do had only to wave us down and we would do it."

  She separated herself from me in order to tell her yarn with larger gestures. I wandered over to my front window to listen--listen while looking through dusty panes into the twigs of a birdless, leafless tree.

  Drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars and Stripes. I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a Communist, and an American.

  "Hooray, hooray, hooray," I'd said.

  On and on Helga spun her yarn, weaving a biography on the crazy loom of modern history. She escaped from the labor gang after two years, she said, was caught a day later by Asiatic half-wits with submachine guns and police dogs.

  She spent three years in the prison, she said, and then she was sent to Siberia as an interpreter and file clerk in a huge prisoner-of-war camp. Eight thousand S.S. men were still held captive there, though the war had been over for years.