coat. He snuck up behind her, threw his arm around her neck with an "Ah-haahhhh!" She shrieked, and then, when he jumped in front of her, laughed. It was one of those chime-laughs that knifed cleanly through the morning, through the tired muttering of all the other kids, hinting this person had never known embarrassment or awkwardness, that even her grief would be gorgeous in the off chance she ever experienced it. Obviously, this was his dazzling girlfriend, and they were one of those tan, hair-tossing Blue Lagoon couples (one per every high school) who threatened to destroy the bedrock of the chaste educational community simply by the muggy way they looked at each other in the halls.
Students observed them with wonder, like they were fast-sprouting pinto beans in a clammy covered aquarium. Teachers —not all, but some—stayed awake all night hating them, because of their weird grown-up youth, which was like gardenias blooming in January, and their beauty, which was both stunning and sad as racehorses, and their love everyone except them knew wouldn't last. I deliberately stopped staring (you'd seen one version of Blue Lagoon, you'd seen them all), but when I'd walked to Hanover and pulled open the side door, I nonchalantly glanced back in their direction and realized with shock, I'd made a major blunder in observation.
Charles now stood at a respectful distance (though the look on his face was still like a kitten staring at string) and she was talking to him with a teacherly frown (a frown all decent teachers mastered; Dad had one that instantly turned his forehead into rippled potato chips). She wasn't a student. In fact, I had no idea how I, given that stance, could possibly have mistaken her for one. A hand on her hip, chin tilted as if trying to make out a falcon circling above the Commons, she wore brown leather boots that resembled Italy and dug the heel of one into the pavement, grinding out an invisible cigarette.
It was Hannah Schneider.
When Dad was in a Bourbon Mood, he'd make a five-minute toast to old Benno Ohnesorg, shot by Berlin police at a student rally in 1967. Dad, nineteen years old, was next to him: "He was standing on my shoelace when he went down. And my life—asinine things I'd wasted time worrying about—my marks, my standing, my girl—it all congealed when I looked into his dead eyes." Here, Dad fell silent and sighed (though it wasn't so much a sigh as a Herculean exhale one could use to play a bagpipe). I could smell the alcohol, a strange hot smell, and when I was little I guessed it was what the Romantic poets smelled of, or those nineteenth-century Latin generals Dad enjoyed talking about who "surfed in and out of power on waves of revolution and resistance juntas."
"And that was my Bolshevik moment, so to speak," he said. "When I decided to storm the Winter Palace. If you're lucky, you'll have one."
And every now and then, after Benno, Dad might go on to expound upon one of his most beloved principles, that of the Life Story, but only if he didn't have a lecture to compose, or wasn't midway through a chapter in a new book on war written by someone he'd known at Harvard. (He'd dissect it like a gung-ho coroner hoping to find evidence of foul play: "Here it is, sweet! Evidence Lou Swann's a hack! Counterfeit! Listen to this dung! 'In order to be successful, revolutions require a highly visible armed force to unleash widespread panic; this violence must then gain momentum, escalating into out-and-out civil war.' Fool wouldn't know civil war if it bit him on the ass!")
"Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story," Dad said, scratching his jaw thoughtfully, arranging the limp collar of his chambray shirt. "Even if you have your Magnificent Reason, it could still be dull as Nebraska and that's no one's fault but your own. Well, if you feel it's miles of cornfields, find something to believe in other than yourself, preferably
a cause without the stench of hypocrisy, and then charge into battle. There's a reason they still put Che Guevara on T-shirts, why people still whisper about The Nightwatchmen when there's been no evidence of their existence for twenty years.
"But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school,