Safe Suicide

Innocents Abroad

156 safe suicide Innocents Abroad I. Overloon War Museum We are tourists, the summer of 1991, my wife Connie and I, on our first (and so far our only) trip outside America. We have come to Holland for the second annual Ploughshares International Fiction Writing Seminar, held at a fifty-five room, double-moated medieval castle in Castle Well, near Venlo, on Holland’s border with Germany, which was also the site of one of the bloodiest tank battles during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, a battle recreated in the film A Bridge Too Far. This entire region had been razed, except for the castle, which had served as a Nazi hospital. The nearby villages have all been rebuilt in the late 1940s and early 1950s, prim brick houses, like the smart little pig built, window boxes, little flags, gardens, no squalor anywhere. Emerson College had bought the castle in 1986, and during the winters used it as the base for a junior year abroad. As our novelist-in-residence, James Carroll had organized the fiction conference there the year before, along with his novelist wife, Alexandra Marshall, and short story writer, Pamela Painter, and her husband, the writer and editor, Robie Macauley. Carroll had guestedited an issue of Ploughshares, and originally we had planned on relating this conference to the magazine as well as to the Writing Program. I had been invited over from Boston to talk about Ploughshares and how to publish in literary magazines, and as program chairman, to familiarize myself not only with the conference and the Castle, but also to visit the new headquarters for our European programs in Maastricht, and to discuss developing a graduate writing program there. For Connie and me it was a job-paid, one-week junket abroad. We were anxious, exhilarated and smitten. Our fourteen-year-old daughter was working as a counselor at a summer camp and our six-year-old son was staying with family friends, and it was our first time vacationing and traveling alone together. I had just turned fifty. We had flown into Brussels, caught a train, straining to make little bits of sense of overheard conversations in 156 German, Dutch, and French, and if you disallow anxiety as an event, reached Maastricht, somewhat reminiscent of Worcester, Massachusetts, but with cafes and cathedrals. We stayed in an Emerson-rented condo for a few days of meetings, a lot of different beers, and four cathedrals (my cloddish response: boy, it must have taken an Age of Faith to put up one of these! . . . sort of like JFK’s getting us to the moon—a whole society’s effort—and then I thought of Henry Ford’s “the man who builds a factory builds a cathedral, and the people who work there, worship there”). One morning when I went jogging, I followed streets into a park, and then followed paths through the park, and recognized what I realized were World War II concrete bunkers and pill boxes; still farther, emerging onto another road, I came to the actual German border, with guards, a guardhouse, and a weighted lift gate across the road, just like ones in the movies. My Maastricht meetings finished, we took another train, with changes to Venlo, where miraculously we were met by an Emerson van, driven by a kid from Boston who had married one of my ex-students. He drove us through bucolia to Castle Well, and the chateau. Double moat, with black swans. Courtyard. Because the rooms were filled with staff and conferees, we were put up at an Inn perhaps a mile away. From there I went running at dawn, learning the terrain by foot. First to the Castle, where I surprised Jim Carroll going for an early walk. We had been filled in on the war history the night before. 25,000 men had died here, Jim had told me, and the streams had run red with blood. Now, at dawn, as we walked, with mists rolling off the cultivated fields and rabbits darting, I tried to imagine this as a place of combat, that copse of trees ahead as a machine gun nest, the panic here, as in so many films, of a patrol, walking on both sides of the road, fearing mines, fearing ambush. Happenstance that I grew up playing on another battleground, Valley Forge State Park, though as a boy I never really thought of it as more than a movie set and playground...