car made it seem we were old friends. On the autobahn I broke down and cried. Everything seemed so familiar, even the highway signs. It was those drives to and from the Zurich airport that concretized what having an expat father meant. Zipping along a Swiss highway in a thrilling easiness of place. To be always at home and always far from home. Did it matter who was coming and who was going?
Michel, the downstairs neighbor, shuffled over and greeted me with his customary “I don’t know if you recall.” I’ve always wondered if he does this only with me or if the stroke five years back made it necessary to verify things before talking. It was good to see him, always charming and alert, teetering on the verge of fashion and ill health. It was good to see everyone, even the people I didn’t know who came up to me and said, “Your father has told me a lot about you.” To be told this by so many strangers! There wasn’t anyone back in Washington he’d have talked to about me. But here, in Switzerland, he seemed to have freely indulged in fatherly pride. It was nice to know that.
I talked to Michel for a long time. Of course, I no longer recall what was said. I’ll have to admit so next time I see him. I talked to lots of people. The apartment was packed. Somehow, not surprisingly, it had turned into a party. Shortly before midnight, I went out onto the balcony for some fresh air. The sky was clearing, the air was cold and dry. The sign flickered on the building across the street, a big orange letter M, which stood for Migros, the grocery store chain. The snow had stopped. The streets were empty. The tram came and went.
Fifteen years earlier, I’d sat out there with my father and asked what he planned to do in his Swiss retirement. “Smoke and stare at mountains,” he said. The next day he came home with a dog, a snuffling, wriggling black puppy. He stood at the front door in a rumpled green track suit, scratching the stubble on his cheek and beaming as his little prize squatted and pissed all over the floor. “No. Not a dog!” Nicole groaned. “Please. Not a dog.”
“She’s not a dog.” He scooped the overexcited animal up and cradled it in his arms. “She’s a retriever.”
I’d never seen that side of him. Was it a put-on? Or was I seeing something only a child can see in a parent who has suddenly and with embarrassing effort opted for light and joy and youth over plodding age and habit? Nicole played up her part as well. “You’re going to clean up every mess. You’re not going let it chew up the furniture. You’re not feeding it from the table. Don’t think I’m taking it out to do its business.” She went on far longer than was necessary, and, naturally, every one of her stipulations was turned on its head within days.
All fathers have a Byronic streak in the eyes of their children. Some more, some less. Even the most conventional and domesticated preserve a core of mystery and dash that is both the source of their authority and the reason for its ultimate overthrow. My father’s Byronic streak had less to do with his faithful hound and imaginary rambles through the mountains than with the smoking, drinking, two-courses-and-a-desert Byron—spiced with cayenne and easily unphilosophized. I was astounded at how much he enjoyed being led around town by that wriggling black smudge. How happy it made him.
When I returned inside, people were beginning to leave. In an hour, all had left but the seriously drunk, who were whittled down at last to a German academic who’d come from Bonn and an American named Blake, who introduced himself with bleary sincerity as “your father’s oldest friend.” He was dressed in a rumpled, once fashionable Italian suit and had brought with him two bottles of Gordon’s gin and an enormous bouquet of flowers, which he had grandly presented to Nicole.
“Who is he?” I asked in the kitchen.
Nicole rolled her eyes. “I told him not to come, but he came anyway.”
“But who is he?”
“An old colleague. He lives near Geneva. On the lake. Last time he was here I had to throw him out.”
Nicole does not generally take a dislike to people. She tends in precisely the opposite direction, is the epicenter of an ever-widening circle of friends and is especially drawn to oddballs and eccentrics. Her gregarious nature was the driving force in the marriage, a force that over the years worked big changes. My father went from a person who generally avoided socializing to being surrounded by admirers, people charmed by his gruff reserve, the sentimental tough guy. He loved being typisch Amerikanisch—as long as typical meant Humphrey Bogart.
Nicole lit a cigarette and began moving empty glasses from the cluttered counter into the sink. She was covering her grief with a get-to-work ethos and heavy smoking.
“Should I ask him to leave?”
“Don’t bother,” she said.
“You sure?”
“He’ll be drunk soon. We’ll call a taxi.”
But he was already drunk and talking fluently in German to the professor.
“Sie waren nie in Bayreuth? Das kann doch nicht wahr sein!” Blake waved his glass at me as I entered the room. “He’s never been to Bayreuth!”
One wishes for clarity in such moments but must usually settle for what might have been. Blake was baiting the professor, playing the boorish American. It was a sophomoric bully sport passed down through Foreign Service generations and always played for the benefit of others in the know. The object was to build up and then suddenly demolish preconceived notions and prejudices, reducing the victim to wondering how little he or she might really know and understand; a bit of professional jujitsu adapted for the cocktail party. My father had been a master. It was always embarrassing when he got going. Had I been thinking clearly, I would have immediately left the room and let the drunkards have at each other. Instead, I fell into the role I’d always played and took sides with the professor. “I’m not too fond of Wagner, either,” I said.
“The man you can hate. But certainly not the music.” Blake grinned, sipping his gin.
“Ach, Quatsch!” the professor spat back, rising unsteadily from his chair.
“But you agree with me,” Blake pressed on. “The model of the German bourgeois interior that mixes history with myth.” His smile had that turned-up quality that presages the opening of another front, but the professor stumbled against the corner of the table and nearly knocked over a lamp.
Nicole came into the room. “I’ve called a taxi,” she announced.
“I’ll walk.” The professor tugged on his cuffs. “My hotel is just around the corner.”
Blake called across the room, “You sure? I’m happy to share a taxi.”
“I would prefer to walk,” the professor said. “The fresh air will be good.”
Blake raised his glass as Nicole escorted the professor from the room. He was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, shin exposed, clutching his scepter of gin, leering as if remembering me in diapers. I was waiting for him to start in with some sort of your-father-once-told-me comment—but he didn’t. He seemed perfectly comfortable keeping silent.
“So. You’re an old friend of my father?”
“That I am, yes.”
“Retired?”
“Right again.”
Nicole and the professor were talking in low tones by the front door. Blake was clearly aware that he was the subject of their conversation and, as some people do who know themselves to be unwelcome, settled back into his chair in an attitude of graceful quiet. I was sitting at the long dining table across the room, fidgeting. The front door closed as Nicole bade the professor good-bye. Rather than join us, she went back into the kitchen.
“So, where are you living these days?” Blake asked.
I ignored the question. “My father didn’t have many friends.”
Blake swished his gin.
“You say you’re an old friend?” I pressed on.
“I