The Wind Chill Factor (3 page)

Undoubtedly I ought to have checked my head at a local hospital emergency room, but instead I eased down off the highway, made a cloverleaf to the right, crossed the southbound lane, and pulled up the steep grade to a Howard Johnson’s, its orange roof peering out through the snow. After a few polite but mildly perplexed looks at my mussed condition, I was given a room facing toward the rear parking lot, away from the highway and backing against a sheer looming bluff of stone several times higher than the motel itself. The parking lot was well lit, snow in a constant filtering of whiteness, cars parked with six inches and more frosting roofs, hoods, trunks. I lugged my bag out of the rear seat, slid the glass door to my room open from the outside, and discovered the room clerk turning on lights, pointing toward the bathroom. He had a butch haircut, the first I’d seen in a long time. His eyes smiled from behind horn-rims.

“Thought I’d come back and see you got in all right.” He nodded his head like the man in the sheepskin coat had done at Fred Harvey’s: a weather comment was coming. “Nothing much happening on a night like this. All day long we’ve been getting cancellations from salesmen snowed in somewhere else. Of course,” he said philosophically, “most of our salesmen decided to stay an extra night, so we’re back to even, I suppose.” He watched me throw the bag on the bed. I pulled the sliding door closed. “Heat’s over there,” he said, motioning to a wall dial. “Bathroom’s in here, color television if you’re one of those guys just can’t stand to miss the Carson show.” He pointed to a blanket folded on the bed. “Brought you an extra blanket.”

“Very kind,” I said. “Do you have any Excedrin? I have an Excedrin headache, definitely.” He went away. Standing at the floor-to-ceiling wall of glass, staring at the white, fluffy parking lot and listening to the wind gnawing at my feet, I realized exactly what I was doing: I was scanning the parking lot for a black limousine with a dented side. I didn’t see one and the smiling desk clerk was telling me that here were my Excedrins and didn’t I look a little pale?

“Yes, I probably do look a little pale,” I said, “but that’s only because my head aches, I’m sick to my stomach, and I’ve been throwing up in the snow on the freeway. Otherwise, I’m fine.”

“Well, you’d better get to bed, then,” he said. Smiling from the doorway he said: “This flu, it’s been going around. Just murder. So get a good night’s sleep.”

Just murder.
Oh, boy.

For a while the Excedrin kept me awake and I kept seeing the man in the sheepskin coat smiling at me and telling me I might not make it to Minnesota. But why had they attacked me? Thrill killers? It didn’t seem likely: surely such psychopaths would have enjoyed the act of murder, would have made very sure. Thieves, then? But they had taken nothing: no papers, no money, no credit cards, nothing. Yet, they had painstakingly lured me into a trap and tried to kill me. How else could I interpret it?

I finally drifted off to sleep, the snow scurrying across the glass wall and the shadows falling in stately bars.

A
S I LEFT MADISON AND
headed north on January 20, my head ached slightly, a patch over my left ear was swollen and tender, but I’d had no recurrence of vomiting. All things considered, with bacon and eggs under my belt, I felt reasonably well. The man at the Texaco station had checked under the hood for loose hoses and leaks, pronounced everything all right. Aside from her cosmetic damage the Lincoln was purring, giving ample evidence of her fine disregard for the economics of fuel consumption. The sun was bright in the east. The sky was glacial. The temperature had fallen to ten degrees.

January 20. Somewhere Cyril was approaching Cooper’s Falls, was perhaps even now landing at Minneapolis/St. Paul. By evening I would know what he wanted, what all the urgency was about.

I knew no more now than I had when I set out from Boston. There was the telegram:
URGENT YOU MEET ME COOPER’S FALLS 20 JANUARY, DROP EVERYTHING, FAMILY TREE NEEDS ATTENTION. CHEERS, OLD BOY. CYRIL
. I had it memorized.

And it meant nothing to me, nothing I could put my finger on. Decorating the family tree, obviously, was the matter of my grandfather’s political eccentricity, but how might that need “attention”? Austin Cooper had died peacefully in his eighties, the family’s oldest friend at his side. It was Arthur Brenner himself, in fact, who had written me of my grandfather’s death a few years before, had told me how my grandfather had peacefully slipped away with Arthur at his bedside. Arthur Brenner had been my grandfather’s attorney, a dear friend of my father’s, although a good many years his senior, and had broken the news to me not only of my grandfather’s death, but of my father’s, my mother’s and my little sister Lee’s, as well. Arthur had helped my father get into Harvard through his own Harvard connections, had aided him in being attached to the Royal Air Force, and had subsequently helped me go to Harvard. And Arthur Brenner himself had commented upon the death of Austin Cooper that at last the family slate was wiped clean. Time would pass, he’d said, and eventually the memory of my grandfather’s Nazism would be gone, and then the memory of my father’s heroism would pass, the family would scatter, and Cooper’s Falls would be only a name on a map without a living soul attached to it.

I pushed on into the afternoon, farther and farther north, closer to home. By early afternoon the sun was gone, the sky the color of my gray suede driving gloves. The radio reported a blizzard developing in the Dakotas and in the western edges of Minnesota. Swinging north, following the river at the Wisconsin-Minnesota border, darkness began and it was no longer as warm inside the car. It seemed as if the fan blowing warm air had slowed, so I reset the temperature controls upward and stopped to refuel. The service station attendant seemed never to have seen the workings of a Lincoln before and had no theories about the failure of the heating system.

Back on the road, which was now a simple two-lane strip cut between banks of fir trees which grew thickly almost to the roadside, I began thinking of the man in the sheepskin coat, wondering if there could be some connection between two such curious events—the telegram from Cyril in Buenos Aires and the attempt to kill me in a blizzard on a highway in Wisconsin. But that was absurd. Surely, I had been victimized by coincidence, and nothing more. Such violence is terribly complex once you begin to analyze it and realize that there is no apparent motive.

For the last stage of the journey, I turned off on a trunk highway, blacktopped, narrow, totally dark. There was no moon; no starlight; no other travelers. I turned the radio off. There were forty miles yet to go and the fans suddenly stopped blowing altogether. There was no heat in the car and what little there had been was quickly dissipated. I stopped in the middle of the road and wrestled my own sheepskin coat out of the back seat and struggled into it, afraid to open the door to the harsh wind. Snow eddied across the frozen snow adhering to the blacktop. It seemed as if I’d been engulfed in a thick blowing fog.

Driving on, it became colder and colder. At first my hands hurt, stung with cold, then they began to lose feeling. I tried to stomp feeling back into my feet. My breath began to freeze in my mustache, in the hair in my nose. Passing familiar turns in the road, I knew I had twenty miles yet to go. I turned the radio back on. They kept saying that it was very cold, that a blizzard was on the way, that it was twenty-five degrees below zero in Duluth.

The car was trying to kill me, I thought. Maybe the Lincoln, which was behaving so uncharacteristically, could accomplish what the man in the sheepskin coat hadn’t. What in the hell was the matter with the heating, anyway? I fastened my eyes on the Lincoln’s hood ornament, pretended that in some miraculous way the chrome ornament was pulling the car through the frozen night. I remembered a movie I’d seen as a child in which there was a motion picture studio called Miracle Productions. Their slogan said: “If it’s worth seeing, it’s a Miracle.”

And finally, in the ragged nick of time, I made the final turn through the trees and eased back off the gas. In front of me were the two stone towers at the entrance to the drive, the gates of my childhood where Cyril and I had waited for the school bus. I sat there, half frozen but forgetting my discomfort for the moment, grinning. Nobody, nothing had killed me. It was still January 20, and I was home at last.

Poplars lined the stretch of road, forming a discreet natural barrier between the Coopers and the curious world: now, in winter, the lights of the Lincoln picked them out against the blackness like gaunt survivors of a death march. Beside the gate on the right was a stone gatehouse with a heavy oak door and long, ancient-looking hinges. During the war years Cyril and I had come down to play with the soldiers who were young and bored and very happy not to be crawling along Omaha Beach. We had touched the Garand rifles and climbed on the jeep and on a few memorable occasions we had gone into town on errands with the soldiers in the jeep, the wind tearing at us as we laughed with the excitement of it all. There are still photographs somewhere of Cyril and me in our regulation suntans, clip-on Army ties neatly in place, properly fitted out with insignia and caps, uniforms our guards had given us one Fourth of July.

The snow was deep and smooth in the driveway. The wind raked off the road, across the immense lawn, and only the vaguest outline in the drifts against the shrubbery indicated the path of the driveway. I chanced it with the new snow tires and slowly but firmly the Lincoln settled into the snow and worked its way forward.

In a while I saw the house, the elms and oaks which shaded the lawn in summer, the veranda which seemed long as a football field, the six squared white columns rising all three stories to the roof with its own tier of cupolas, chimneys rising out of the roof in faint shadows.

The house was dark. There would have been a light for me if Cyril had arrived. He wouldn’t have gone to bed, not with me on my way. He wasn’t here yet. The snow had held him up. No one was here. I left the car running and plodded calf-deep through the virgin snow. I had decided to spend the night in the cottage down by the little private lake on which we’d sailed and ice skated as children: it had always been my favorite spot. But first, hopelessly cold and tired as I was, I wanted to step inside the great house itself. Five years. … I had been away five years and all that time the key to the front door remained on my ring. Turning my back against the wind churning along the veranda, I fitted key to lock and stepped into the front hall.

My footsteps echoed in the parquet-floored entry. Reflexively I reached for a switch, snapped it, saw a dim yellowish light come on against the wall. The yellow shaded bulbs had been fitted into the old gas fixtures. Although the house was no longer lived in, arrangements had been made for Emil Blocker, who had been the caretaker for forty years, to come by once a week with his wife and keep it dusted, clean. I stood looking the length of the foyer as it widened to take in the huge, gently sloping staircase. On either side there were sliding doors, opened, giving on shadowy expanses of drawing rooms. I had grown up running wildly through these rooms, playing tag and hide-and-seek with Cyril, making far too much noise and being hushed by our nanny or grandfather’s secretary. Now I couldn’t even summon up a ghost. I had never felt more alone in the stillness, listening to the wind and snow outside, the inevitable banging of something that had come loose at the back of the house.

I went through one drawing room, turned on another light, and walked into the library. It had been my refuge in the house from early on, even before I could read the books. My grandfather would let me sit in a huge leather chair, cracked and split and incredibly ancient, while I turned the pages of encyclopedias and historical atlases and obscure magazines which have long since passed out of existence.

Now the room looked as warm and comforting as ever, as if my grandfather had just gone up the stairs to retire for the evening. Logs had been laid in the cold grate opposite his desk with its brass student lamps. Books lining the walls had been dusted. The World War II position map was still punctuated with colored pins. I stepped closer to it and realized that my grandfather had been refighting the German breakthrough in the Ardennes during the winter of 1944–45, called the Battle of the Bulge ever after, when he had died.

Another series of pins, all white, marked the corridor which was to have been used for Hitler’s escape at war’s end. A realist at all times, my grandfather had always labeled those who thought the escape route might actually have been used as “romantic idlers.” Hitler was dead, and in my grandfather’s view Hitler’s fate had been earned by his own gross excesses and perversity, was richly deserved for having squandered his chances.

But there was still a good deal of wallspace given over to framed and frequently autographed photographs of my grandfather in the company of world leaders. There was even one of him puffing a token cigar with Winston Churchill when Churchill was alone in the wilderness of the 1930s. My grandfather was, of course, at political swords’ points with Churchill but admired him enormously. Most of the black-and-white photographs were, however, efforts to capture forever moments with the Nazi leaders: sitting in slatted lawn chairs in slanting late afternoon sunlight with Hitler in some flower garden, chatting with Hitler and Eva Braun at a table laden with the remains of a casual luncheon while a pair of German shepherds drowsed at their feet, peering intently at a bottle of wine being exhibited by von Ribbentrop, who bears an expression of such vacuous arrogance as to be laughable, standing by an immense Mercedes-Benz touring car with a vague smile on his face as if trying to ascertain the reason for Goering’s obvious mirth.

There were also a great many family pictures, one of which showed me holding a baseball bat, wearing a Chicago Cubs cap, smiling at my grandfather, who wears a characteristic suit and tie. There were pictures of my father, young and quietly concerned, and my mother laughing, holding my little sister Lee, who died. …