had launched, and sold to a conglomerate, a company that made herbal teas with colorful New Age names and progressive box-top homilies.
Worn faces, fresh faces, familiar ones and strange ones. There were the people who worked for Hartman Capital Management. Prized clients, like good old Fred McCall an who'd dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief once or twice. Former colleagues of his from his days teaching in East New York; newer colleagues of his from the job he'd just taken at an equally poor high school in Mount Vernon. There were people who had helped him and Anna in their time of need. Above all, there was Anna, his francee, his friend, his lover.
Before all of these people, Ben stood before a rostrum at the raised platform at the end of the hall and tried to say something about his father. In the previous hour, a very fine string quartet one that Max Hartman had helped sponsor had played an adagietto by Mahler, adapted from his Fifth Symphony. Erstwhile business colleagues and beneficiaries of Max had evoked the man they knew. And now Ben found himself speaking, and wondering as he spoke, whether he was really addressing the assembled or himself.
He had to speak of the Max Hartman he knew, even as he wondered how much he ever did know or could know him. His only certainty was that it was his task to do so. He swallowed hard and continued speaking: "A child imagines that his father is all-powerful. We see the pride and the broad shoulders and the sense of mastery and it's impossible to think that this strength has limits. Maybe maturity comes of recognizing our error." Ben's throat constricted, and he had to wait a few moments before resuming.
"My father was a strong man, the strongest man IVe ever known. But the world is powerful, too, more powerful than any man, however bold and determined he may be. Max Hartman lived through the darkest years of the twentieth century. He lived through a time when mankind revealed how very black its heart could be. In his mind, I think, the knowledge defiled him. I know that he had to live with that knowledge, and make a life and raise a family, and pray that his knowledge would not shadow our lives as it did his own. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" Again Ben paused, took a deep breath, and pressed on.
"My father was a complicated man, the most complicated man I have ever known. He lived through a history of astonishing complexity. A poet wrote:
"Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities.
"My father liked to say that he only looked forward, never behind. That was a lie, a brave, defiant lie. History was what my father was shaped by, and what he would always struggle to overcome. A history that was anything but black and white. The eyesight of children is very sharp. It dims with age. And yet there is something that children really don't see too well: the intermediate tones. Shades of gray. Youth is pure of heart, right? Youth is uncompromising, resolute, zealous. That is the privilege of inexperience. That is the privilege of a moral cleanliness untested and untroubled by the messiness of the real world.
"What if you have no choice but to deal with evil in order to fight evil? Do you save those you love, those you can, or do keep yourself pure and unsullied? I know I never had to make that call. And I know something else. A hero's hands are chapped, scuffed, chafed and callused, and only rarely are they clean. My father's were not. He lived with the sense that, in fighting the enemy, he had also done work that served their purposes. In the end, his broad shoulders would be bowed with a sense of guilt that none of his good deeds could ever erase. He could never forget that he had survived when so many he had cherished did not. Again: After such knowledge what forgiveness? The effect was that he redoubled his efforts to do what was right. Only recently have I come to understand that I was never truer to him and his own sense of mission than when I thought I was rebelling against him, and his expectations for me. A father wants, above all, to keep his children safe. But that is the one thing that no father