Page 148 of Code 6

They hadn’t spoken since opening night.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about your play,” he said.

She stopped. They were standing near a seventy-year-old gravestone, beneath a seventy-foot blue spruce that was the same age.

“Dad, I don’t want to get into it here.”

“It was terrific.”

“Oh,” she said. Not the words she’d expected.

“You were right,” he said. “I did turn a blind eye.”

“That wasn’t the point of my play.”

“Isn’t that the point ofanyhistorical work—that history repeats itself?”

She hadn’t really thought of that. But he had a point. “I suppose.”

“Tell me again. What was the name of the president of IBM’s German subsidiary?”

“Willy Heidinger.”

“Heidinger, yes. I remember his line: ‘Might as well do business with the Nazis, because if we don’t, they’ll just nationalize the company and take it, or get it from someone else.’”

“I don’t know if he actually said it. But that was pretty much his approach, at least in my interpretation.”

“It made me think of Jeremy.”

Kate couldn’t disagree. “Not a bad comparison.”

“Watson made me think of me.”

Kate glanced back at the mausoleum, recalling how her interpretation of Watson had clashed with Irving’s. “It all depends on how you think of Watson.”

“I think he lived with regret.”

“That’s one interpretation,” said Kate. “Others would say he was too much of an egomaniac to admit a mistake, even to himself.”

“By ‘others,’ you mean his son?”

Again, she glanced toward Irving’s final place of rest. Visions of red ink came to mind, the felt-tipped pen shaking in a hand that grew weaker with each passing day.Conflict, Kate! We need more conflict!

“Like I said. It’s all a matter of interpretation.”

Silence hung between them. Kate knew what he was wondering, and she hadn’t prepared to discuss a certain daughter’s interpretation of her own father. But in some ways, she’d been preparing all her life.

“You know, I still think Irving had it wrong,” said Kate.

“Had what wrong?”

“Tom Junior didn’t hate his father. The old man infuriated him to no end. But he didn’t hate him.”

“So he tolerated him?”

“More than that,” said Kate, looking him in the eye. “I think he loved him very much.”

The air around them seemed to lose some of its chill.