Memoirs Of A Cold War Son

Epilogue

Epilogue In the weeks before I left for Oxford, my mother pampered me as if I were a schoolboy recovering from the flu. I could tell that she was recovering from something more than a normal case of motherly anxiety over the Berlin crisis. She had become despondent, and my homecoming revived her. I felt I should have come to her aid during the Second World War, and I had been bracing myself ever since then never to let her down again. Lately, I had borrowed moral grounds for unselfish action from the writings of Camus and the lessons of German history. But going to Mom’s defense in September 1961 was inadvertent and unconscious , not in the least heroic, and I have never congratulated myself for it. Would she have suffered a relapse if I had not come home? Maybe not. Still, I saw at last that my time of service abroad in the Cold War had reached the limit for my family. I came back for only a month, but that was long enough to refuel my search for self with a strong reminder of origins and debts. In 1967 Mom did have a relapse, in Princeton, where Dad had joined the history department three years earlier. Late in August he called me at Stanford to report that she was very depressed. “I don’t know why she’s so down,” he said, “but thank God it’s not as bad as in the forties. She’ll have to spend a few weeks in the hospital, and you don’t have to come home unless it gets worse.” It didn’t. She soon pulled out with complete rest and new medications. She would use these remedies several times thereafter to curb depression and avoid hospitalization. Dad retired in 1970, four years after winning the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America for his book, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought. He was terribly disillusioned by the radical politicizing of college campuses during the 1960s. John and I had tried in vain to persuade him that the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley made valid criticisms of educational bureaucracy and that the war in Vietnam had become senseless. “Just remember one thing about youth movements throughout history,” Dad rebuked us as if we were cardcarrying naifs bent on revolution, “they grow old.” It was a lousy time for him to grow old, and I was sad to see him embittered at the end of his distinguished career. Dad and Mom moved to Haskell in 1971, living in Miss Ada’s bungalow that had been rented since her death while I was at Oxford . They were happy in Haskell until Dad’s health deteriorated and they both realized how much they missed college towns. Only a few of the regulars who gathered for morning coffee at the drugstore on the courthouse square caught on when Dad claimed to have discovered that “Home on the Range” derived from a bucolic Roman song, “Domus in Prato,” written at the time of Virgil. Dad died shortly before Christmas 1986. His pallbearers were two farmers, the druggist, a hardware storekeeper, and a grocer. We gave him the epitaph he had requested shortly after returning to Haskell: “Always devoted to family and to the study of history as two necessities of civilization.” For many months after his death I thought daily of having been named after him, and I had to be ready to leave the room if I pictured him during a class or committee meeting. After a year of living alone, Mom asked John and me to find her a nice retirement home before she grew so old she would resent us for putting her in one. We found a remarkably benevolent home in nearby Abilene, run by the Methodist Church. John moved her there 218 : Epilogue on a gray, sleety February day. “Only a Yankee would take his mamma to an old folks’ home on a day like this,” she said with characteristic humor to break the emotional tension that John was trying to hide with silence. During her last few years, she filled a few of the many gaps still remaining in what I knew about her relationship with Dad. She had begun to fall for him at a Sunday picnic held on the lawn of the local water company, when he leaned over to the group she was...