The Wind Chill Factor (2 page)

Finally I climbed under the blankets and listened to the wind whistling at my door until I fell asleep.

The next day they tried to kill me.

T
HE SECOND DAY OF MY
trip home was a more intense version of that first afternoon out from Boston. I drove westward into the face of a gray and shifting curtain of blowing snow which cut visibility and speed to a minimum. Shapes were constantly being overtaken and recognized almost as you were upon them, and headlights made lovely but unproductive halos on the snowflakes. The radio warned continually against any travel, reeling off great lists of school closings and canceled meetings. But I gave no thought to stopping, to the possibility of arriving late. Cyril had said the twentieth and the twentieth it would be.

In Indiana and Illinois the weather cleared and I let the Lincoln off its leash to run flat out for a while, learning by radio that the storm was ahead of me, lying in wait once I turned north from Chicago on the Illinois Tollway and headed on up into Wisconsin. But for now there was hazy sunshine and I tried to ease the tension in my arms which had accumulated during the hours of wheel-gripping zero visibility.

It seemed peculiar in 1972 to be driving along through a country which had developed its own set of new-old problems and crises while thinking back to my childhood in Cooper’s Falls with a grandfather whose name had become, through the years of German rearmament in the 1930s, a synonym for the idea of Americans who were admirers of the Nazis, who sympathized for whatever personal reasons with Nazi aims in Europe.

In the mid-30s, before I was born, the anti-Semitism being practiced within Germany was not much known in our part of the country, was not a matter of overriding concern. It was, in a widespread view, a question which would doubtless be with us always and, in the end, each nation had to deal with Jews—and particularly Jewish wealth and leverage—in its own way. In my grandfather’s view, Jews were thought of in a business sense exclusively, and if you couldn’t really trust them then they weren’t that different from anyone else. There was certainly no reason why you couldn’t coexist with them. They were a fact of life and while he would not go out of his way to rescue a Jew, neither would he have gratuitously done one any harm. They were simply a group apart and how they handled their problem was their own business. He might have said the same of the Catholics.

Austin Cooper was not, then, a
crazy
racist or bigot. He was, beneath the glaze of colorful and inaccurate publicity, a rather cool realist who felt that Europe was an ailing, faltering giant which must somehow be made strong again for the long-term good of both the world’s and Austin Cooper’s economy. It was his bet that Europe would best be served by the emergence of a dynamic leader, or group, which would give birth to a new pride, a new nationalism, a new confidence which would bring Europe back to her feet again. His belief grew with the Depression and so did his involvement with Fascist politics in Germany, Italy, Spain, and England. Nationalism was the answer and if it made for war, so be it. Money survives war, thrives on war. War was no problem. There have always been wars. Mankind loved wars. The point was to make wars pay.

What concerned me, as a child innocent of politics, were the purely personal aspects of having Austin Cooper, America’s Number One Nazi as he was called in
Liberty
and
Collier’s,
for a grandfather.

My brother Cyril and I were far closer to our grandfather than might normally have been the case. We were too young to have suffered any particular shame at his exploits. For us he was a lean, exceptionally well-tailored elderly man with coins and books for us, a rather sad demeanor, a precise manner of speech, and a surprisingly quick laugh for so serious a man. He played croquet with us on the immense back lawn during the war; he was in his early sixties and wore a white shirt and black tie; by then it was no longer felt safe for him to go out in public for golf or any other occasion.

But if he was only a solemn benevolent figure to us, there were other aspects to having him around, aspects which were a terrible burden to our father, who was a grown man in the company of other grown men. They associated him with the American Nazi photographed on the front pages chatting with Adolf Hitler, riding in an immense open car with Goering and Speer and Frau Goering, meeting behind closed doors with Alfried Krupp and then coming out to engage in smiling handshakes, sealing God only knew what kind of fiendish bargain.

That was what our father had to contend with. Born in 1910, Harvard 1932: a handsome, artistically inclined man who wanted at one time to be a painter. He traveled with his father to Germany in the sparkling days of Berlin’s glories in the 1920s, again in the 1930s, when there was a somewhat different aura, met the great men who were deciding how to reshape Europe and, as sons do, he reacted violently against all they—and by association his father—stood for. So, while Austin Cooper came to stand for American Nazism, our father Edward, in his all too brief life, did what he could to oppose the Nazi wickedness. Finally, in 1941, he gave his life flying for the RAF in aerial combat over the English Channel. His Spitfire was never found, his body never recovered. There were articles written about them at the time: one the living traitor to all that America meant, the other his son martyred for freedom. It made hellish good copy, I suppose, if the men in question were not your grandfather and father.

On December 8, 1941, by order of the President, our many-chambered mansion on the estate looking down on that lovely river and the falls which bore our name was put under armed, uniformed Army guard and so it stayed until several months after the war ended. Austin Cooper was cordoned off, protected from all those with reason to wish him ill.

C
HICAGO LAY SMOKING AND VAST
, a smudge of industrial haze frozen in the sky above it. As I swung northward against the grain of wind the overcast swept toward me. Soon I was in it again, feeling the two-and-a-half-ton Lincoln take the blasts on its great slab sides. And the snow came swirling across the frozen fields and the sun was reduced to nothing more than a dim grayness behind the howling wind and snow.

I pulled up off the tollway to one of the Fred Harvey emporiums. The place was virtually deserted, cups echoing in saucers: there was an unreal, unearthly quiet about it all, as if, insulated in its cocoon of snow, Fred Harvey had opened a space station. There was a curious moment when I felt as if I’d fallen among automatons and was the only living thing within reach.

The spell was broken when the girl brought my coffee. She smiled past some remnants of high-school acne and commented on the weather. “It seems like night already,” she concluded and went away. Two men came in to the eating area and sat down, ordered coffee. One of them, a tall, balding man in a sheepskin coat came over and asked if he could read the
Tribune
lying on the counter beside me. I told him it wasn’t mine and he was welcome to it. He smiled and shook his head at the snow blowing across the expanses of glass, obscuring the view of the highway below us.

“Heading north?” he asked with a friendly, gaunt smile.

“All the way to Minnesota,” I said.

“You may not make it,” he said sadly as if we were all facing this common enemy together. “I hear it’s bad, worse the farther north you go.”

“I suppose it is,” I said.

“Well, it’s a hell of a thing.” He lit a Kool and folded the newspaper in large, long-fingered hands. He looked like a cowboy, herding cattle home through the drifts. “Thanks for the paper,” he said and went back to his companion.

They were quietly drinking coffee when I put my gloves on and went back outside to my car. I was wearing my favorite turtleneck sweater, a heavy oily thing woven by some little old lady in the Hebrides, nothing but thick wool, yet soft as glove leather. The car surged to life immediately, and I ran through the checklist in my mind making sure everything was functioning perfectly. I drove slowly across the service area past a black limousine standing by a bank of pumps. The men inside the restaurant had come back outside. They were standing by the black car, and sheepskin coat waved to me as I passed him and rolled down the ramp to the empty white pit that slowly revealed itself as the tollway.

I was daydreaming without losing my concentration on the road. I would let Cyril dominate my thoughts for a time, then Digby would take his place and I’d be bringing her back to Cooper’s Falls for the first time as I’d done so many years ago. My father would be talking to me, the way he’d never had the opportunity to do in reality; my grandfather would address the croquet ball, deliberately, black tie flapping in a summer breeze, and I could hear the solid sound of mallet on ball. …

Early evening had overtaken me and the snow was thicker. The roadway had grown slippery with packed snow and ice. Visibility was a joke. I hadn’t seen more than a half dozen other vehicles in an hour and I had just passed the state line into Wisconsin when I saw the black limousine suddenly beside me, only a few feet away on my left. It was sliding toward me and there wasn’t time to react before I felt the impact, felt the Lincoln gliding off the road unable to grab hold on the hard-driven snow.

Like a pair of gigantic ice skaters, we slid through drifting snow, plowing slowly on down a ridge of crusty whiteness. I spun the wheel, took my foot off the gas, hoped that somehow the snow tires would catch. The black limousine finally detached itself, pulled away and ahead of me, stayed on the shoulder as I slid downward. Finally I felt solid footing behind the rear axle and in an uncharacteristic instant of clear thinking I shoved the gearshift into low and hit the gas, hoping to regain control. Curiously, the maneuver worked and I felt the Lincoln gather itself together, push through the snow below the level of the highway, and claw its way back up to the shoulder, snow rising like waves in front of me, beside me, all around me. I suppose it took only a few seconds from the initial impact until I was back on the shoulder, but it seemed an agonizing lifetime, a nightlong terror which left me suddenly sick to my stomach, shaking, dripping with sweat. I sat clutching the wheel, gulping air in an attempt to keep from vomiting.

The black limousine appeared again out of the snow, its lights blunted against the storm. I could hear it honking, saw the sheepskin coat waving to me, watched as it pulled in ahead of me and stopped. In view of my own lights, doors opened on either side of the limousine and the two men got out and hurried back toward me, leaning into the wind. I pushed open my door, which creaked sorely at the hinges and stepped out, feeling the full blast of wind and a coldness which had not been there when I’d left Fred Harvey. It cut through the sweater and the gaunt man in the sheepskin coat was shouting to me.

“Are you all right?” His voice was nearly smothered by the wind. Snow bit at my face and eyes.

“Yeah, I’m okay, I guess,” I said.

“Jesus, I couldn’t help it,” his companion said, a short stout man in a blue duffel coat. “I’m sorry as hell, fella.”

We stood looking at the damage: paint scraped off, door and front fender badly creased. “Shit,” I said.

“I’ll look back here.” Sheepskin coat ducked his face down behind the fleecy collar and walked toward the rear of the Lincoln. There was no sound but the raving of the storm.

Blue duffel coat beckoned me toward the front wheel, pointing at the fender. He knelt in the snow, seemed to be tugging at the fender, pulling it back from the wheel. I joined him, on my knees in the snow. The fender didn’t seem to be rubbing against the tire and I turned to say so.

I never got the words out. I felt instead a blunt, numbing sensation on the side of my head. I heard the sound of something against my skull, heard a man grunt softly with exertion near my ear, felt the snow rushing against my face and then there was nothing.

H
OW LONG CAN YOU LIVE
lying in the snow in below freezing temperatures? I don’t know. But I survived. I was stiff with cold when I awoke and when I lifted my head it bumped against the undercarriage of the Lincoln: somehow I had half hidden myself underneath the car. I had survived the attack for two reasons. Sheepskin coat had done an ineffectual job of bludgeoning me and the warmth from the huge engine, retained against the cold, had kept me from being frozen to death.

Slowly, painfully I wriggled into the open. Our films and television have insulated us against the reality of physical violence because our heroes survive it each week and in each film. I had suspected we were being fed something less than the truth. Standing beside the Lincoln, leaning desperately against its wounded side and puking into the snow, I found my suspicions confirmed. It was more horrible—both the physical reality and the knowledge of menace hovering over me with a tire iron in its hand—than I could possibly have imagined, even in the delirium of drunkenness. Those sons of bitches had left me in the road to die, actually
die
—and I had lived by a quirk of chance. Suddenly I was aware of the weather: I opened the door, hauled myself back up into the driver’s seat, and turned the key. The Lincoln fired back to life with me, spraying warm air around the leather interior, defrosting the windshield. The Lincoln was saving my life.

The side of my skull was sticky with blood and terribly tender to my fingertips’ pressure. I sat in the warmth trying to calm down and get my thoughts sorted out. Then I got back out of the Lincoln, washed the side of my head with snow, washed the blood off my hands, and set out again. The front tire was not rubbing the fender.

The night was dark. I was back on the road. I couldn’t see far enough ahead to push much past forty, and it occurred to me in one of those delayed-action double takes that the black limousine might appear once more, that these bastards might keep doing this to me until they did it right.

It wasn’t until I saw through the storm the highway equipment, red lights flashing, pushing a path in the snow, that I began to feel reasonably safe again. There were men in those huge vehicles, men in the trucks full of sand—normal men doing their jobs, trying to protect me from the storm rather than lying in wait to kill me. Slowly, deliberately, I clung to the plows and sanders all the way to Madison, which glowed through the storm like a friendly apparition.