swear I won't tell her anything I find out."
"Oh, Stew," my sister said, tart as always, "when was the last time you kept a secret? Haven't you figured out yet what you liked about being a reporter? I'll sign whatever you like after she's gone. But I don't want to hear another word about this now. Maybe you should spend some time asking yourself why you're hyperventilating to learn all this."
I already had. Every day and every night. But the simplest answer to Sarah was probably the best: he was my father. We can all dream up the hero we want to be when we're adolescents and spend our adult years trying to live out the ideal, but sooner o r l ater we each realize that our options are limited b y t he raw materials, that dose of DNA we get and the imprinting of early childhood. As a young man, I did not see myself in Dad. Now when I go through the many photos I have assembled from his youth, there are moments when I cannot tell whether the fellow standing there is he or I. That body, which years ago stopped belonging to either of us, was fundamentally one: the same corrupted posture, sagging somehow from a point between the shoulder blades, the same dark-complected look like a warm tan, the same uncertain approach to the camera, unsure how much to surrender. I have his nose, they say, and at moments, his haunted eyes. From Dad I got my taste for salty things, and my acceptance of the Trappers' losses as a piece of fate.
In my research, I discovered many unacknowledged debts I owed my father. Scouring his letters, and later, what he had written for Leach, I was struck that my old man could turn a phrase. My father spent two hours every night reading any novel he could get his hands on, a habit so unvarying that he actually wore two rawhide stripes into the leather ottoman where he perched his feet. Yet it had never clicked that Dad was probably the source of my own interest in writing, even though I'd always been heartened by his quiet pride in my bylines. Now, looking back, I realized that he must have intervened to get my mother to quit her pestering about law school.
Yet it was not the things I liked about myself that fed my hunger to find out what he'd done wrong. In the end, I fear it was probably more of the affliction that had made me a happy observer in criminal courtrooms for decades: I wanted to know Dad's failings, so I'd feel better about my own.
And given what happened next, you might say that self-acceptance is not all that it's cracked up to be. But I have always been a slave to impulse, and slow to face the fact. When I look in the mirror, I see a trim guy, inconveniently burdened with a few dozen pounds that belong to someone else. That's because the thinner fellow, with his good intentions, generally holds the rudder on my soul. On a perpetual diet, I'm the guy at the restaurant who orders the little salad that comes topped with a tiny pellet of poached salmon--before I eat the French fries off everybody else's plates. My eternal undoing arrives in these instants when my appetites are more than I can handle. My saddest turn as a courthouse reporter came in the early '90s as I was walking past the jury room and, with no planning whatsoever, pressed my ear to the door, hoping for a scoop on an important verdict. When a bailiff caught me, I was suspended from the paper for thirty days and, far worse, showered doubt on every honest success before and after. It's a lifetime pattern. I resist. I struggle. But I also succumb.
Which in this case means that when I wrote back to Barrington Leach, I not only set a date to visit, but formally released him from any legal responsibility for what he might reveal. How? I simply stated that my mother had died a few years ago and that I was an only child. Just like the crooks I covered for twenty years, I told myself that nobody would ever know.
DAVID: MAJOR ROBERT MARTIN
October 22, 1944
With the Third Army in France
Dearest Grace , I have been sent to the front
"Oh, Stew," my sister said, tart as always, "when was the last time you kept a secret? Haven't you figured out yet what you liked about being a reporter? I'll sign whatever you like after she's gone. But I don't want to hear another word about this now. Maybe you should spend some time asking yourself why you're hyperventilating to learn all this."
I already had. Every day and every night. But the simplest answer to Sarah was probably the best: he was my father. We can all dream up the hero we want to be when we're adolescents and spend our adult years trying to live out the ideal, but sooner o r l ater we each realize that our options are limited b y t he raw materials, that dose of DNA we get and the imprinting of early childhood. As a young man, I did not see myself in Dad. Now when I go through the many photos I have assembled from his youth, there are moments when I cannot tell whether the fellow standing there is he or I. That body, which years ago stopped belonging to either of us, was fundamentally one: the same corrupted posture, sagging somehow from a point between the shoulder blades, the same dark-complected look like a warm tan, the same uncertain approach to the camera, unsure how much to surrender. I have his nose, they say, and at moments, his haunted eyes. From Dad I got my taste for salty things, and my acceptance of the Trappers' losses as a piece of fate.
In my research, I discovered many unacknowledged debts I owed my father. Scouring his letters, and later, what he had written for Leach, I was struck that my old man could turn a phrase. My father spent two hours every night reading any novel he could get his hands on, a habit so unvarying that he actually wore two rawhide stripes into the leather ottoman where he perched his feet. Yet it had never clicked that Dad was probably the source of my own interest in writing, even though I'd always been heartened by his quiet pride in my bylines. Now, looking back, I realized that he must have intervened to get my mother to quit her pestering about law school.
Yet it was not the things I liked about myself that fed my hunger to find out what he'd done wrong. In the end, I fear it was probably more of the affliction that had made me a happy observer in criminal courtrooms for decades: I wanted to know Dad's failings, so I'd feel better about my own.
And given what happened next, you might say that self-acceptance is not all that it's cracked up to be. But I have always been a slave to impulse, and slow to face the fact. When I look in the mirror, I see a trim guy, inconveniently burdened with a few dozen pounds that belong to someone else. That's because the thinner fellow, with his good intentions, generally holds the rudder on my soul. On a perpetual diet, I'm the guy at the restaurant who orders the little salad that comes topped with a tiny pellet of poached salmon--before I eat the French fries off everybody else's plates. My eternal undoing arrives in these instants when my appetites are more than I can handle. My saddest turn as a courthouse reporter came in the early '90s as I was walking past the jury room and, with no planning whatsoever, pressed my ear to the door, hoping for a scoop on an important verdict. When a bailiff caught me, I was suspended from the paper for thirty days and, far worse, showered doubt on every honest success before and after. It's a lifetime pattern. I resist. I struggle. But I also succumb.
Which in this case means that when I wrote back to Barrington Leach, I not only set a date to visit, but formally released him from any legal responsibility for what he might reveal. How? I simply stated that my mother had died a few years ago and that I was an only child. Just like the crooks I covered for twenty years, I told myself that nobody would ever know.
DAVID: MAJOR ROBERT MARTIN
October 22, 1944
With the Third Army in France
Dearest Grace , I have been sent to the front
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