The 158-Pound Marriage Read online

  Severin Winter never came close to a national title. The year he was runner-up in the Big Ten, he was placed sixth in the national tournament. He was pinned in the semifinals by the defending national champion from Oklahoma State, and pinned again in the second round of the consolation matches by a future geologist from the Colorado School of Mines. And in the wrestle-off to decide fifth from sixth, he lost another convincing decision to Jefferson Jones of Ohio State.

  I once spent some time trying to interview the wrestlers who had beaten Severin Winter; with one exception, none of them remembered who he was. 'Well, you don't remember everyone you beat, but you remember everyone who beat you,' Winter was fond of saying. But I discovered that Jefferson Jones, the wrestling coach at a Cleveland high school, remembered Severin Winter very well. Altogether, over a three-year period, Winter had wrestled Jefferson Jones five times; Jones had beaten him all five.

  'That boy just couldn't get to me, you know,' Jones told me. 'But he was one of those who kept coming. He just kept coming at you, if you know what I mean. You'd break him down on his belly and he'd work like a stiff old dog to get back up to his hands and knees again. You'd just break him down on his belly again, and he'd get up again. He just kept coming, and I just kept taking the points.'

  'But was he, you know, any good?' I asked.

  'Well, he won more than he lost,' said Jones. 'He just couldn't get to me.'

  I sensed in Jefferson Jones an attitude I'd often felt radiating from Severin. A wrestler's ego seems to stay in shape long after he's out of his weight class. Perhaps their history of cutting weight makes them tend to exaggerate. For example, to hear Winter describe the exploits of his ancestors is to be misled.

  His mother was the Viennese actress Katrina Marek. This much of his story is true. Katrina Marek's last performance in Vienna's Atelier was on Thursday evening, 10 March, 1938. The papers claim she was an 'astounding' Antigone, which seems a suitable role for her to have played at the time; she would have required loose garments for her costume, for she was eight months pregnant with Severin. The Friday performance was canceled due to her failure to show up. That would have been Black Friday, 11 March, 1938, the day the Anschluss was decided, the day before the Germans marched into Austria. Katrina Marek knew the news early and got herself and her fetus out of the country in time.

  She took a taxi. Apparently, even this much of Winter's story is true. She actually took a taxi - herself, her fetus and a portfolio of her husband's drawings and paintings. The paintings, oil on canvas, had been taken off their stretchers and rolled up.

  Severin's father, the artist, didn't come. He gave Katrina the drawings and paintings and told her to take the taxi to the Swiss border, to take a train to Belgium or France, to take a boat to England, to go to London, to find the two or three painters in London who knew his work, to ask them to find a theater in London that would employ the Austrian actress Katrina Marek, and to show the drawings and the rolled-up canvases to anyone demanding proof of who she was. She was to say, 'I am Katrina Marek, the actress. My husband is the Viennese painter Kurt Winter. I am Viennese too. You see, I am pregnant ...' But clearly, even dressed as Antigone, anyone could see that.

  'Don't drop that baby until you're in London,' said Kurt to Katrina. 'You won't have time to get it a passport.' Then he kissed her goodbye and she drove out of Vienna on Black Friday, the day before the Germans drove in.

  Incredibly, in Vienna alone, the first wave of Gestapo arrests took seventy-six thousand. (Katrina Marek and the unborn Severin Winter were boarding a train in St Gallen, bound for Ostend.) And the father who stayed behind? To hear Severin tell it, his father stayed behind because he was devoted to the revolution, because there was still something a hero could do. Someone, for example, drove the daring, criminal editor Herr Lennhoff across the Hungarian border at Kittsee - after having been turned away by the Czechs. Another taxi was used. Kurt Winter could have been reading Lennhoff's editorial about the German Putsch as late as noon and still have gotten away with it; Hitler was in Linz only at noon. 'That was cutting it close,' Severin Winter has admitted. The first time he told the story, it sounded as if his father was the driver of the cab that drove Lennhoff to Hungary. Later this became confused. 'Well, he could have been the driver,' Winter said, 'I mean, he needed a big reason to stay behind, right?'

  And the business about the zoo. I checked the facts on that, and it's at least recorded. In 1945, just before the Russians got to Vienna, the entire zoo was eaten. Of course, as the people got hungrier, small raiding parties had escaped, mostly at night, with an antelope or a zebra here and there. When people are starving, it seems silly to be taking care of all that game. Yet the Army reserves were on guard duty, day and night, in the great sprawling zoo and botanical gardens on the grounds of the Schonbrunn Palace. Winter has implied that the reserves were rationing the animals to the poor people, one at a time - a kind of black-market zoo, according to him. But then the story gets cloudy. Late on the night of April Fool's Day, 1945, twelve days before the Soviets captured Vienna, some fool tried to let all the animals out.

  'My father,' Winter said once, 'loved animals and was just the right sort of sport for the job. A devout antifascist, it must have been his last act for the underground ...'

  Because, of course, the poor fool who let those animals out was eaten right away. The animals were hungry too, after all. The freed animals roared so loud that the hungry children woke up. It was as good a time as any for butchering the last meat in Vienna; the Soviets were already in Budapest. Who in his right mind would leave a zoo full of food for the Russian Army?

  'So the plan backfired,' Winter has said. 'Rather than set them free, he got them killed, and they ate him as a favor.'

  Well, if there ever was such a plan, and if Winter's father had any more to do with that zoo bust than with Lennhoff's escape. If he stayed behind, why not make heroics the reason?

  Utch says she can sympathize with Severin's impulse. I'll bet she can! I once had a thought of my own about their similar ancestors. What if Utch's father, the saboteur of Messerschmitts in Wiener Neustadt, was something of a two-timer and led a double life? What if he knocked up this actress in Vienna, where he posed as a brash young artist, bought off a paternity suit with a bunch of drawings and paintings, blew up the Messerschmitts, got caught but not killed (he somehow escaped), had no inclinations to return to a raped wife in Eichbuchl, felt especially guilty on April Fool's Day, 1945, and tried to atone for his sins by liberating the zoo?

  You see, we historical novelists have to be as interested in what might have happened as what did. My version would make Severin Winter and Utch related, which would explain parts of their later union which remain curious to me. But sometimes it calms me down to think that they just had their war stories in common. Two heavies from Central Europe with their bundle of shrugs! When she was cross, Utch was fond of reducing the world to an orgasm. Severin Winter rarely gave the world credit for much else. But when I think of it, they had more than a war in common.

  For example, those rolled-up canvases and drawings that Kurt Winter gave to Katrina Marek are very revealing. All the way to England she never once looked at them, but at British customs she was obliged to open the portfolio. They were all nudes of Katrina Marek, and they were all erotic nudes. This surprised Katrina as much as it surprised the customs official, because Kurt Winter was not interested in nudes, or in any other form of erotic art. He was best known for rather spectral colorist work, and for some unsuccessful variations on Schiele and Klimt, two Austrian painters he followed and admired too much.

  Katrina stood embarrassed at the British customs desk while an interested customs official looked carefully at every drawing and painting in her husband's portfolio. She was approaching a full-term pregnancy and probably looked very harassed, but the customs official who smiled at her and graciously let her into England (for the bribe of one of the drawings) probably saw her more as Kurt Winter had seen her - neither preg
nant nor harried.

  And the painters who were to help Katrina find theater work in London were never meant to feel obliged to perform this service out of their respect for the art of Kurt Winter. He did not send art to England; he sent an Austrian actress with poor English, pregnant, graceless and scared, into an English-speaking country without anyone to take care of her. What he gave her in the portfolio were advertisements for herself.

  Painters and gallery directors and theater directors said to Katrina, 'Uh, you're the model here, aren't you?'

  'I'm the painter's wife,' she would say. 'I'm an actress.'

  And they would say, 'Yes, but in these paintings and drawings, you're the model, right?'

  'Yes.'

  And despite her nine-month growth, which was Severin Winter, they would look at her appreciatively. She was well taken care of.

  Severin was born in London in a good hospital in April of 1938. I attended his thirty-fifth birthday party and overheard him telling Utch, when he was quite drunk, 'My father was a lousy painter, if you want to know the truth. But he was a genius in other ways. He also knew that my mother was a lousy actress, and he knew we'd all starve in London if we went there together. So he set up my mother in the best light he could imagine her in and removed himself from the overall picture. And it was her best light, too,' he told Utch. He put the palm of his hand flat against Utch's belly, a little under her navel. He was as drunk as I've ever seen him. 'And it's all our best lights, if you want to know the truth,' he told her. At the time I was struck that Utch appeared to agree with him.

  Severin's wife, Edith, would not have agreed with him. She had finer bones. She was the classiest woman I've ever known. There was so much natural good taste about her - and about what you imagined about her - that it was always a shock to see Severin beside her, looking like an awkward, maltrained bear beside a dancer. Edith was a relaxed, tall, graceful woman with a sensuous mouth and the most convincing, mature movements in her boyish hips and long-fingered hands; she had slim, silky legs and was as small-and high-breasted as a young girl, and as careless with her hair. She wore all her clothes so comfortably that you could imagine her asleep in them, except that you would rather not imagine her sleeping in any clothes. When I first met her, she was almost thirty - the eight-year wife of Severin Winter, a man who wore his clothes as if they were all hair shirts of the wrong size; a man whose shortness stunned you because of his width, or whose width stunned you because of his shortness. He was five feet eight inches tall and maybe twenty pounds over his old 157-pound class. The muscles in his back and chest seemed to be layered in slabs. His upper arms seemed thicker than Edith's lovely thighs. His neck was a strain on the best-made shirt in the world. He fought against a small, almost inconspicuous belly, which I liked to poke him in because he was so conscious of it. It was as taut and tough-skinned to the touch as a football. He had a massive, helmet-shaped head with a thick dark-brown rug of hair which sat on the top of his head like a skier's knit hat and spilled like a cropped mane just over his ears. One ear was cauliflowered, and he liked to hide it. He had a cocky boy's smile, a strong mouth of white teeth with one weird bottom tooth knocked askew - a V-shaped chip taken out of it, nearly as deep as the gum. His eyes were large and brown and far apart, and there was a knot on the bridge of his nose that was only noticeable when you sat to the left, and a crook where his nose had been broken another time that you saw only when you looked at him straight-on.

  He not only looked like a wrestler, but wrestling was a constant metaphor to him - one he frequently mixed, being both romantic and practical. His gestures were those of a trained wild man; he was crude and chivalrous; he made much of dignity but often seemed foolishly out of place. At our faculty meetings he had a reputation for bilingual oratory, a belligerent belief that education was going to the dilettantes and 'the Now-ist Dogs', a principle that 'knowledge of the wretched past' was essential and that at least three years of a foreign language should be a requirement for any college graduate. (He was an associate professor of German.) Needless to say, he was a baited man, but he was baited cautiously. He was too athletic a debater to be recklessly provoked; he had developed sarcasm to a point of fine pain; and he had the dubious ability to outlast anyone in a world (like the academic committee) where tediousness is a virtue. Also, despite his affiliation with the German Department, it was well known that he was the wrestling coach. In fact, he was stubborn about that, especially with strangers. When introduced, he would never admit that he taught in the German Department.

  'Are you with the university?'

  'Yes, I coach wrestling,' Severin Winter would say. Once I saw Edith cringe.

  But he was never a physical bully. At a party for new faculty members he had an argument with a sculptor who threw a substantial uppercut into Winter's misleading football of a belly. Though a head taller than Winter, and ten pounds heavier, the sculptor's punch caused his own arm to fly back like dead weight off a trampoline. Winter never budged. 'No, no,' he told the sculptor impatiently. 'You've got to get your shoulder into a punch, get your weight off the back of your heels ...' There was no hint of retaliation; he was playing the coach, a harmless role.

  His insistence on the sporting life - to the boredom of more than a few friends - once led me to suspect that he'd never been a good wrestler at all, so when I was asked to lecture on the historical novel at the University of Iowa, I thought I might try to look up Winter's old coach. I had a sudden notion that Jefferson Jones of Ohio State might have invented an opponent he'd beaten five for five.

  I had no trouble finding the coach, retired to some honorary job of fussing in the Athletic Department, and I asked him if he remembered a 157-pounder named Severin Winter.

  'Remember him?' the coach said. 'Oh, he could have been great. He had all the moves, and the desire, and he kept coming at you, if you know what I mean.'

  I said I did.

  'But he blew the big ones,' the coach told me. 'He didn't psych himself out exactly. You wouldn't call it clutching up - not exactly. But he'd make a mistake. He only made big mistakes,' the coach decided, 'and not too many. In the big matches, though, one mistake's enough.'

  'I'm sure it is,' I said. 'But he was the runner-up one year, in the Big Ten, at 157 pounds?'

  'Yup,' the coach said. 'But the weight classes have changed since then. That's actually the 158-pound class now. It used to be 123, 130, 137, 147, 157 and soon, but now it's 118, 126, 134, 142, 150, 158 and so on - you know.'

  I didn't, and I certainly didn't care. Everyone says the academic life is one long prayer to detail, but it's hard to match athletics for a life of endless, boring statistics.

  Occasionally I would chide Winter about his great love. 'As a former 157-pounder, it must be nice, Severin, to involve yourself in a field that's changed one pound in ten years.'

  'What about history?' he'd say. 'How many pounds has civilization changed? I'd guess about four ounces since Jesus, about half an ounce since Marx.'

  Winter was an educated man, of course his German was perfect, and evidently he was a good teacher - though there is some evidence that native speakers of a foreign language don't always make the best teachers. He was a good wrestling coach, but the way he got the job was a fluke. He was hired to teach German, but he never missed a wrestling practice and rather quickly became an unofficial assistant to the head coach, a thunkish heavyweight from Minnesota who'd been both a Big Ten and national champion at the time Winter wrestled for Iowa. The ex-heavyweight shortly dropped dead of a heart attack while he was demonstrating a setup for the fireman's carry. (Winter said, 'I thought he looked like he was setting it up all wrong.') Caught in midseason without a coach, the Athletic Department asked Winter to fill in. He told Edith it had been his secret ambition. His team finished the season so strongly that he was salaried as head coach for the next year, creating only a small, unuttered scandal among the more petty faculty who were envious of his double pay. It was only his enemies in the Division of Lan
guage and Literature who made any claim that Winter gave less than enough time to his German students because of his new work load. Naturally this disgruntlement was never expressed to his face. Enrollment in German actually soared, since Winter required every member of the wrestling team to take his language.

  Winter claimed that wrestling helped him as a German teacher (but he would claim that it helped everything he did - indeed, he claimed it aloud and in various company, his hand on Edith's sleek bottom, shouldering her off-balance and jarring her drink: 'It makes everything work a little better!').

  Their affection for each other seemed real, if strange. The first night Utch and I had dinner with them we drove home very curious about them.

  'God, I think he looks like a troll,' I told Utch.

  'I think you like how she looks,' Utch said.

  'He's almost grotesque,' I said, 'like a giant dwarf ...'

  'I know you,' Utch said; she put her heavy hand on my thigh. 'You go for her kind, the bones in the face - the breeding, you would say.'

  'He has almost no neck,' I said.

  'He's very handsome.'

  'You find him attractive?' I asked her.

  'Oh ja, more dan dat.'

  'More than that,' I corrected her.

  'Ja,' Utch said, 'and you find her attractive, too?'

  'Oh ja, more dan dat,' I said. Her strong hand squeezed me; we laughed.

  'You know what?' she said. 'He does all the cooking.'

  I will say that Severin was no savage at preparing food - only at eating it. After dinner we sat in their living room; their sofa curved around a coffee table where we had brandy. Winter was still ravaging the fruit and cheese, popping grapes, slashing pears - gobs of Brie on bread and chunks of Gorgonzola. He continued with his dinner wine, to chase his brandy. Utch was sleepy. She put her bare foot on the coffee table and Winter seized it at the ankle, looking at her calf as if it were meat to be deboned.