The third time she did it, the teacher had her dropped from Honors English. When the principal told her to report to a class filled with students who could barely stay awake until three P.M., she charged into the office of the teacher after school, crying and in a rage. She called him a snarf and a jerk and a dog turd and said she was going to write the governor about him.
“What’s a snarf?” he asked.
“A guy who gets off on sniffing girls’ bicycle seats,” she replied.
He placed a box of chalk on the desk and told her to write “I will not call Mr. Shepherd a snarf” one hundred times on the blackboard. She picked up the box of chalk and threw it at his head. “You were born for the stage, Linda Gail,” he told her. “That’s not a compliment.”
As she fixed dinner for Hershel and herself, she wondered why, at this time in her life, those memories from her adolescence seemed so important. Unfortunately, she knew the answer. The best moments in her young life had been with the books she discovered on the shelves of the bookmobile. Roy had told her he loved her for her innocence. That was the way she wanted to remember herself, as Judy Garland singing among the Munchkins. She knew the reality was otherwise. Even as a child, she had always been self-centered, never passing a mirror or a store window or the glass trophy case in the school hallway without looking at her reflection. Linda Gail not only stole the lines the other students had stayed up all night memorizing, she committed an act of theft upon herself. She had lied about who she was all these years. The innocent child she wanted to remember had never existed. She was a fraud then and a fraud now.
She wanted to talk honestly with Hershel without hurting him more than she had hurt him already. How do you tell someone you don’t love him, that you are not drawn to him physically, that even during your most intimate moments, images of other men have always lived on the edges of your consciousness? Is that person supposed to be consoled because you add that you admire and respect him? There are certain things you never say to another human being. An apology from an adulterer is an apology from an adulterer. Telling the person whom you married and slept with for years that you never loved him was nothing short of calculated cruelty.
Her own thought processes were driving her crazy.
She fixed his favorite dinner—pork chops and sweet potatoes and canned spinach mixed with mashed-up hard-boiled eggs. She set out clean place mats and the good silverware and lit the candles on the candelabra and set it in the middle of the table and sat down across from him. She ate in small bites, her eyes on the plate, wondering what she should say. “Did you know your color has come back?” she asked.
“Think so?” he said.
“I believe it’s because of our visit with Weldon. Gathering pecans and sitting on the gallery, like people do in Louisiana.”
“Yeah, I’m glad we did that. It was nice, the weather and all.”
“He was proud you remembered the time in the Ardennes when he was kind to you. He thinks very highly of you, Hershel.”
“You ever notice how your accent comes back all of a sudden?”
“Did you know I have the same speech coach as Audie Murphy?”
“That’s something, isn’t it?”
“We’ve gotten ourselves in a mess, haven’t we?” she said.
“I want you to go back to Hollywood and finish your picture. I can take care of myself. There’s no problem here, Linda Gail.”
She touched the tip of her fork to a piece of pork chop but didn’t lift it from the plate. Nor did she raise her eyes. “I don’t believe I’m cut out for Hollywood. Even if I were, I think they’re pretty well done with me.”
“No, ma’am, they’re not. I always believed your name was going to be up in lights. You were born for the screen.”
“My Honors English teacher said something like that years ago.”
“He was a smart man.”
“He was telling me I was a self-centered brat.”
“He was probably jealous, that’s all. Sometimes prophecy can come from the mouth of a fool.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“I just made it up.”
“I’m sorry for all that I’ve done to you, Hershel,” she said.
“When people make mistakes, there’s usually a reason for it. These pork chops are something else.”
She knew at that moment that Hershel Pine was probably the best human being she’d ever known. She also knew that others aside from her had done terrible damage to her husband and their friends. She determined then that they would pay for it, one way or another, starting with one person in particular.
EARLY THURSDAY MORNING Linda Gail drove downtown to a photography store and had multiple copies made of the typed note and the photos of the four female mental patients. Then she drove to the post office and sent two airmail manila envelopes to Los Angeles.
When she got home, Hershel was working in the yard, repairing the damage he had done to the St. Augustine grass and the flowerbeds. She went into the kitchen, her pillbox hat still on her head, and drank a cup of coffee at the drain board. Then she called Roy Wiseheart’s house. A maid answered. “May I speak to Mrs. Wiseheart, please?” Linda Gail asked.
“She’s taking a nap, ma’am.”
“This is Mrs. Pine. Wake her up, please.”
“She don’t like to be woke up, ma’am.”
“It’s in regard to her appearance at the meeting of Daughters of the American Revolution. It’s quite important.”
“I’ll go look in on her and be right back.”
Linda Gail waited for two minutes, staring out the window. Hershel saw her and waved. She heard someone pick up a second receiver, scraping it out of the phone cradle. “What do you want, Mrs. Pine?”
“I received the photos and note you or one of your assistants sent me. I wanted to thank you personally for being so concerned about our friend Rosita Holland.”
“What photos?”
“Of the lobotomized women. Hershel and I showed them to Weldon and also to Roy, which I’m sure is what you wanted us to do.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t send them?”
“Why would I send you photos of any kind? We share nothing in common. We have no kind of relationship. Because you slept with my husband doesn’t give you access to my private life. I think you should talk to a psychiatrist.”
“I felt it was only appropriate that I alert you to some phone calls you’ll be receiving. You’ll be receiving an appreciable degree of media attention, not the kind that impresses members of the DAR. I saw in the newspaper that you’ll be their guest of honor at the River Oaks Country Club next week.”
“What phone calls?”
“I sent the photos and the note special delivery to Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.”
“Why should either of them care about photos of mental patients? Mrs. Pine, I’m convinced you’re impaired. Why Roy decided upon a dalliance with you is beyond me. He usually likes Hispanic girls he finds in the Islands.”
“I attached a statement about my affair with Roy and made it as detailed as possible, including the places where we had our trysts, down in Mexico, at the Shamrock Hotel, wherever or whenever it was convenient,” Linda Gail said. “I mentioned as many Hollywood names as I could. I also mentioned that Frankie Carbo was a guest in your home and that Roy was on a first-name basis with Bugsy Siegel. I explained to Louella and Hedda the retaliatory means you’ve taken to get even for your husband’s ongoing infidelity. In short, I wanted them to know what a vicious, hateful, anti-Semitic witch you are, Mrs. Wiseheart. You have every right to despise me, but to do what you’ve done to Rosita Holland takes a special kind of woman. Good-bye, and I hope you stay germ-free the rest of your life.”
Chapter
29
THURSDAY MORNING I w
oke at sunrise in a room on the fifth floor of a brick hotel in Wichita Falls. From my window I could see a drugstore down below, with a Coca-Cola sign hung like a large red button over the entrance. I could also see a diner and a Western Union office and a five-and-dime store and, down the street, a mechanic’s shop with a sign that said WE FIX FLATS. Each of these things was somehow emblematic of both modernity and tradition, or perhaps simply an echo of the 1920s, which was probably the most prototypical decade in our history and the one for which we are forever nostalgic. I was gazing down on the America of Norman Rockwell. It was the America all of us grew up in and believed in and fought for. Now all my thoughts were dedicated to fleeing it, with my wife, in whatever fashion we could. It was a strange way to feel.
I had eight thousand dollars in cash, the clothes in the suitcase, the German Luger and a box of ammunition, and no car. I also had no plan. The pilot who had flown me to Wichita Falls had said his plane would be available in three or four days. He asked if I would be returning to Houston. I told him I didn’t think so. I didn’t mention that when I left Wichita Falls, I would have someone with me and would probably be in a hurry.
Entering Mexico wouldn’t be difficult, I thought. There were still dirt roads that led to wooden bridges over the Rio Grande, with indifferent border security on both sides. The Mexican government never discouraged the presence of gringo dollars in its huge culture of prostitution and narcotics and pornography and police corruption along its northern rim. And the illegals we called wetbacks, who went back and forth across the river with regularity, had been a welcomed source of cheap labor since the Mexican Cession. The challenge was getting out of the state without being arrested.
I looked toward the west. Clouds of orange dust were rising into the sky. They reminded me of the year 1934, when I rope-dragged a bucket of water and a hammer and a nail bag and a box of burlap sacks up on Grandfather’s roof and began securing the house against a storm that seemed biblical in proportion. Even though the temperature was close to freezing, I opened the hotel window and unlatched and pushed out the screen and put my head outside. The morning sounds of the city swelled up from the concrete, but it was the wind that defined the moment. It was out of the west, cold and bright and hard-edged and smelling of land that still had the imprints of dinosaurs in its riverbeds. I could feel my face tightening and starting to burn in the cold, my eyes watering. I had a sense of apprehension but also of hope, of new frontiers that awaited us, of finding safe harbor in America’s past rather than in the present.
I closed the window and brushed my teeth and shaved. Then I sat down at the small writing desk with my journal and tried to think clearly. There was one issue to concentrate on. I had to get Rosita out of the asylum, away from functionaries who genuinely believed they were helping others by destroying their brain cells. How would I be able to do here what I hadn’t in Houston? I’d brought the Luger I had taken off a German officer we’d pulled from the basement of a house hit with a phosphorus shell. His skin had literally boiled on his skeleton, dissolving all of his features. Even his fingers had been burned off. The only remnants of his face were his eyes, staring helplessly out of all that pain. The syrette of morphine our medic tried to inject into his arm was useless. The German officer asked me to shoot him. I wouldn’t do it. When we had to move out, he was still alive. Now, with the same Luger I might have used to end a man’s suffering, I was broaching the possibility of shooting an orderly, a nurse, a minimum-wage security officer, a janitorial person, a passerby, a sheriff’s deputy with peach fuzz on his cheeks.
I wrote in my journal: Good morning, Lord. We could surely use some help. Please take us safely over Jordan. If you can’t do that, at least get us out of Texas.
I put on a pair of khakis and sunglasses and a tie and my leather jacket and half-topped boots, and with a clipboard in my hand and two fountain pens and a mechanical pencil in my shirt pocket, I took a cab to the asylum. The cabbie said local people called the asylum the White Sanitarium, not because of its off-white color but because White was the name of its first director. The sanitarium was located on a knoll and was two stories high and had a tile roof and a design similar to that of the high schools constructed all over the country during the 1920s. Except it didn’t look like a high school. There was nothing ornamental or graceful or redeeming about the building’s architecture. It was stark, utilitarian, the fountain in front dry and webbed with heat cracks. Even the solitary tree by one of the walls was as bare as a talon.
“You visiting a family member here?” the cabbie asked.
“I’m trying to track down the survivors of a Nazi death camp. There’s a patient here who might know what happened to them.”
“You came to the right place.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“The personnel here are good folks. This is a right popular place in Wichita Falls.”
“Can you drive around back? I’d just like to see the building.”
“Sorry, it’s restricted back there.”
“Why is it restricted?”
He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “I guess they don’t want the patients wandering off or getting in people’s automobiles. Where you from?”
He dropped me off in front of the building. I was never good at lying. Most Southerners are not. As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as “you son of a bitch” with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a “lying son of a bitch,” you know he’s serious. I had just lied to the cabbie. And I was about to tell a lot more lies as the day progressed. I didn’t know if I would be up to the charge.
There is a trick you learn in the army that you never forget. There will always be a man in your unit named Smith or Jones or Brown. That’s why it is so easy to shirk an assignment in the armed forces. All a shirker has to do is scratch his own name off a duty roster and substitute the name Smith or Jones or Brown, and someone else will probably show up on KP or guard or latrine duty in his stead. To my shame, that was the ignoble model I was using.
The receptionist was occupied. I gazed down the corridor and tried to memorize every name I saw painted on the frosted glass of an office door. The light was poor, and I couldn’t see the lettering distinctly. Then it was my turn to approach the receptionist’s desk. Her name was Leona Penbrook. She was a large, cheerful woman with thick hands and rings of baby fat under her chin. She wore a pink suit and a white rayon blouse with frills flowering out of the lapels. Her bright smile, her perfume, her sanguine nature, her southern Midlands accent, which you begin to hear west of Fort Worth, the aura of goodwill she seemed to exude with no agenda, were as pleasant and unpretentious as we can ask of human beings. The word I’m looking for is “heartening.” She was one of those people who remind us that decency and courage and charity are found most often among the humblest members of the human family, and most of them get credit for nothing. This was the lady to whom I was telling the same story I had told the cabbie, and it was creating a sensation behind my eyes like a rubber band about to snap.
“You’re a researcher for a refugee group?” she said.
“More or less. Actually, I have a degree in history from A&M,” I replied. “I always hoped to become an anthropologist.”
“It sounds like you’re doing a very good deed for someone. Whom did you say you spoke to?”
“It was the governor’s office that called,” I said. “I think he talked to someone named Smith and someone named Jones or Johnson.”
“We have a Jones here, but he’s on leave right now. What did you say your name was?”
“Malory. I just need to talk to Mrs. Holland for a few minutes.”
“She’s heavily medicated, but I guess you know that.”
“Not with any specificity,” I replied.
“She??
?s here for a series of procedures. She was in an extermination camp?”
“I think she was in two of them. Terrible things were done to her, Mrs. Penbrook. My outfit liberated one of the camps near Landsberg. After the Ardennes, my sergeant and I went into one of the camps by ourselves. The SS had just pulled out.”
I had told the truth about Rosita’s history. Mrs. Penbrook knew I was telling the truth, and she knew I had seen the same things a patient in the sanitarium had seen, a woman locked in a room with memories others couldn’t imagine, and that somehow I wanted to undo the evil done to that person. For a moment I believed she realized I had lied about my identity and the purpose of my visit and yet was willing to put my deception aside. But in a situation such as mine, one that involved my wife’s survival, I knew it was foolish to presume that others will follow their charitable instincts when it comes to their jobs and supporting their families.
“I tell you what,” Mrs. Penbrook said. “It’s warming up now, and some of the patients are going out on the lawn for a bit. You have a seat, and I’ll make sure Mrs. Holland is among them.”
Ten minutes later, I walked out on the back lawn, one that sloped through trees to a parking lot enclosed by a cyclone fence. I could see Rosita in a wheelchair, her back to me, a blanket pulled to her chest, a shawl over her head. I knew it was she, my warrior woman from the Book of Kings, the woman who had winked at me from under a pile of corpses, the bravest and most beautiful human being I had ever known. A big-shouldered black woman in a nurse’s uniform and a mackinaw attended her. The black woman had dignified features and thick hair with gray swirls in it. She adjusted the blanket to keep the wind off Rosita’s neck. The sun was shining in Rosita’s eyes, forcing her to squint. I walked between the sun and her chair and looked down at her, waiting for her to recognize me. Her face looked freeze-dried, insentient, her eyes half-lidded, as though she were falling asleep or already inside a dream. “My name is Malory, Mrs. Holland,” I said. “I’m here to talk with you about some people you may have known in Germany.”