Before playing the tape for them, Pax wanted to know about the captain, Gunther Olaf Ericson. Nancy had been estranged from him for much of her life and had only found a way to let him back into her heart after he had become so important to Bibi. What was it that had come between Nancy and her father, back in the day?
From what little Pax had said upon arrival in Room 456, Nancy was aware that the tape contained an explosive revelation that might forever change her understanding of both her father and her daughter. As she strove to condense a significant portion of her past into a montage of moments, she held fast to one of Bibi’s limp hands. Her stare fixed sometimes on the floor, sometimes on the night pressing at the window, and sometimes on Bibi’s face, but it darted often to the small tape recorder, which Pax kept in his hand as if it was too precious to put down and risk that it might be knocked to the floor, broken.
Gunther had been a good man, Nancy said. Basically good. He wanted to do the right thing. The problem lay in his priorities. He was perhaps a man who should never have married or, having married, should not have had children, yet he’d had two daughters, Nancy and Edith. A warrior at heart, and for the right reasons—love of country and family—he signed up for one tour of duty after another, making of the Marine Corps not solely a career but also a full life of such intensity that his domestic life as husband and father became pale to him, became like the episodes of a bland television program that he watched from time to time when war and cold war would allow. He loved his wife and his daughters, but he lacked the language of the heart in which that love might be properly expressed. He was fluent in the language of honor and integrity and sacrifice, able to understand men who risked their lives for their country, who would die to protect a comrade in arms. But he couldn’t relate as easily to a wife who loved the small things of life, the quiet details in which it was said that you could discern the meaning of existence. Or to the daughters whose temperament was more like their mother’s. Anyway, as children, they possessed no awareness of the dangerous nature of the world or of the sacrifices required to keep America safe, to spare them from the horrors and deprivations that so many people in other countries endured as the given nature of existence.
When Nancy’s mother died in an accident, Gunther was away at war and didn’t get home in time for the funeral. If he understood what his grief-stricken children needed from him, he didn’t know how to give it. He seemed to be shaken if not devastated by his loss, but also bewildered, as though he had thought that all risk of death arose from the violence an enemy nation could wreak on his homeland, as if for him such threats as car accidents and house fires and cancer were abstractions, likely only as the consequences of enemy attack. He genuinely believed that a woman’s touch was required to raise two girls, and as he didn’t intend to remarry—“No one could ever replace your mom”—the woman he had in mind was his dead wife’s sister, who did indeed welcome Nancy and Edith into her home.
“I never felt I really knew him,” Nancy said, “until he came to live in the apartment over the garage. The way he was with Bibi…well, he found the father in himself, once war no longer needed him.” Her attention returned once more to the tape recorder in Pax’s hand. “You said he left that tape for Bibi. You’re sure it’s all right for us to listen?”
“It’s not only all right,” Pax said. “It’s essential.”
Pogo agreed. “But if a nurse or anyone walks in, we switch it off. It’s too big, too radical, too freakin’ wild to let it go beyond the four of us.”
“If it ever goes beyond us—that’s not ours to decide. That’s Bibi’s call,” Pax said.
He put the tape recorder on the bed as Nancy and Murphy moved closer. He pressed PLAY. From the small speaker came a tinny but nonetheless impressive version of Captain’s voice.
“My sweet girl, dear Bibi, this is my apology if it turns out one is needed. I have had a few years now to think about what I did, and I am less sure than I once was that it was the right thing. I am at times eaten by regret. I’m talking about the frightening event that I helped you to forget, but also about the memory trick itself, which you might have forgotten not because you were made to forget it, too, but because children naturally forget so much from their early years….”