Time for a little excursion down the rabbit hole. Ready or not, here it comes…
Part III: The House With No Windows
Chapter 12.2
Copenhagen, Denmark 12 April 1939
Niels Bohr, Walter Eisenstadt, and Saul Rosenthal sat with Aaron Schwarzwald listening to Imogen as she played a few disjointed passages from her latest work, her Second Piano Concerto, a work still incomplete, yet Bohr nodded appreciatively as she played. “That is marvelous, a truly interesting passage,” he said at one point. “I felt transported, Aaron. She still has the gift…”
Saul smiled. He loved Imogen so much it hurt, yet on days like this he felt transported by his love for her, transported to a place beyond space and time. ‘But,’ he thought, ‘isn’t that what Niels is responding to…? To some place beyond…?’
Once she finished Imogen left her mother’s cherished Bösendorfer piano and went to the kitchen to help Krista, the family’s longtime housekeeper, prepare tea and toast to go with the fresh blackberry jam she’d found at the market earlier that day.
Yet it was Saul who was the first to speak once Imogen left the room. “Chamberlain is out. The vote will come any day now.”
“Thank God,” Bohr sighed. “This can’t come a day too soon. Any idea who will replace him?”
Saul looked down and shook his head apologetically. “Churchill,” was all he managed to say.
“Then it is war,” Aaron Schwarzwald said, his voice a faltering whisper.
“This war was never avoidable,” Eisenstadt said, and Bohr nodded in emphatic agreement. “Now we are all dancing to the madman’s tune, so perhaps it lies with old Winston now. He just might be the only man left who can put this djinn back in his bottle.”
“You can’t be serious,” Aaron sighed. “With Churchill in power all out war is all but guaranteed. This is a catastrophe!”
Bohr laughed at that. “The Sudetenland was a catastrophe, Aaron. Chamberlain was the catastrophe, so now it is up to Churchill to clean up Chamberlain’s mess. We can only pray that he is up to the task.”
Saul cleared his throat. “Professor Eisenstadt? You said you had urgent news?”
Eisenstadt nodded. “I have talked with Werner. He is certain the Germans will move on Norway. The heavy water project. That is the real objective.”
“So, it is true?” Saul sighed – looking first at Eisenstadt then to Bohr. “Herr Hitler wants to build this bomb you two have spoken of?”
“Yes,” Bohr replied, “but even so, Heisenberg is certain he can stall the program, keep it from achieving its aim.”
“I am not so certain,” Eisenstadt said, his voice flat now, “that I would be so willing to bet the future of the human race on Heisenberg’s certainty he can forestall the development of such a weapon.”
“Oh, der Führer puts much more stock in the occult,” Bohr said, his voice tinged with derisive sarcasm. “He may not even understand what such a weapon means.”
“I am unwilling to underestimate,” Saul said, taking in a deep breath as he spoke, “anything this Hitler concocts. He might be a madman, yet he has discovered the uncertain strength that resides within the dark underbelly of humanity. Professor? How certain of these facts are you?”
“I spoke with Werner last week. Why?”
“Face to face?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I assumed you wanted me to convey this information to His Majesty’s government. Or am I incorrect?”
“Can you get to Churchill? Directly?” Niels asked.
Saul nodded. “It will take some doing, but yes.”
“What about Roosevelt?” Eisenstadt said.
Saul shrugged. “Do you trust anyone else with this information, Professor? Hopkins, perhaps?”
“So, can you get this information to Washington?” Eisenstadt asked again – as he shrugged.
“I’d do better to go to Princeton. Talk to Albert and the others. You were just there, weren’t you?” Saul asked Eisenstadt.
“Last year, yes. Should I cable him?”
“If you think it’s safe to do so. But yes, I will go to London tomorrow and I can arrange to go on to New York from there.”
“You must be back by June,” Bohr sighed.
“Oh? Why?”
“The Wehrmacht will begin moving troops towards east in early summer.”
“Is this from Heisenberg, as well?”
“No. I overheard this on a train in Berlin,” Bohr sighed. “Two colonels talking – under the influence, I might add.”
“The east, you say?”
“Yes. I’d say Poland, from what they were saying. One of them mentioned that the secondary objective would be rounding up Jews.”
Saul and Aaron looked at one another.
“This will not end well, Aaron,” Saul whispered to Imogen’s father. “I beg you, please, leave now…while there is still time.”
But Aaron shook his head. “After all that I have said to you about this you still fail to hear me. I will never leave Denmark. Not ever. This is my home, but more than that, this home is the place where my heart and soul reside. These are my people, Saul, lives I have sworn to care for. You know this, Saul, so speak of it no more.”
Niels leaned forward and nodded to Aaron: “If anything happens, Aaron, please know that I will care for Imogen no matter what happens, and Werner knows how I feel about this. He will look after her should we be overtaken by events.”
Saul looked away when he heard that last bit of bravado. ‘If anyone gets overtaken by Herr Hitler,’ he thought, ‘there will be no safe haven…there will be only a last lingering twilight before a night without end.’
So many plans to make, so many contingencies. So much love waiting to die on the vine.
He watched Imogen as she walked into the room carrying a plate of toast and jam and he felt the last rays of the sun dance in this old room once again, even as a late winter’s snow started to fall in the twilight.
Beverly Hills, California 7 January 1992
These days Ted Sorensen went to the office only a few days a week and at most he’d spend a half day there. At the level he was playing, life was all about finding the right people to do the heavy lifting, and he’d set up the office in his new house to be at least as productive as his office at the studio. One of his secretaries had been permanently assigned to the house for a while, but he’d found her presence annoying and had sent her back to work for someone else. Now he kept in touch by fax and went to the office only when the most important duties called.
Sorensen really didn’t like getting out and mixing it up with people anymore, and for the last few years he’d led an ascetic’s life. His only indulgence was Debra, and he lavished her with all the attention and love he felt she deserved, and there was literally nothing she wanted that he didn’t immediately secure for her. The problem with all this was, however, quite easy for anyone to see, if anyone had ever bothered to look: Debra had patterned off her father and never really wanted anything beyond the simplest food and drink, so when her classmates wagged their tails about wearing the latest jeans or sneakers she simply couldn’t relate. Her clothes were classically stylish yet durable, and she always appeared neat and presentable – and what else mattered? What was status when you didn’t care about such things?
She’d had a few friends in elementary school but nothing lasting developed until she reached high school. Her mother had attended the Westlake School for Girls and that school had now merged with her father’s alma mater, The Harvard School for Boys, so it was only natural she attend – and this despite all her intellectual gifts. She could have attended college when she was eleven years old but Ted didn’t want to deprive her of all the experiences growing up and going to high school might provide.
Then he realized he’d never taken Debra skiing before. Or sailing. Or riding the trails around Sequoia on horseback. All the things he’d done as a kid growing up here or up north.
‘What the hell have I been doing?’ he wondered…
‘…but she never complains, does she?’
In fact, she seemed to live inside a world of her own, and maybe she did, he thought, because the world really wasn’t ready for someone like her. At least that’s what his own mother kept telling him.
“There’s nothing wrong with her, Ted. And I don’t think that she’s different, either. But there’s nothing I can point to that makes me think she’s imagining all this…”
He’d told his mother about the things she’d said, about the tall feathered visitors and journeys to oceans and stars, but now as she listened to Ted her heart filled with dread. So many varieties of schizophrenia were genetic transcription disorders easily passed along from generation to generation, and the thought that Anders’ own peculiar guilt-paranoia might be passed along to Debra was something that had kept her up at night.
So Ted’s call, when it finally came, wasn’t completely unexpected.
But what happened next was.
Ted had techs from the studio come in and wire Debra’s room with all kinds of state-of-the-art video recording equipment, with passive night vision and even infra-red cameras installed in the ceiling. He sat up one night and watched her sleeping – only one moment she was there in the bed and in the next instant she was gone. Simply gone. He’d run from his office and up the stairs to her bedroom and – yes – she was indeed no longer there.
She was, instead, in the shower. Drenched in sea water. Kelp wrapped around an ankle. And she was shivering.
He’d turned on warm water and picked her up, held her close until the coldness passed, but he noticed that everything about her now smelled of the sea. Her night clothes, her hair and even her skin, and he was terrified. Terrified enough to call his mother the next morning.
She listened, startled, as Ted spoke on the phone. And now terrified that her son was slipping into his father’s own peculiar psychosis. And so she came to the House With No Windows that afternoon.
She despised Ted’s house, everything about it. From the brooding menace of the exterior to the cloistered feel of the too-dark interior. The gallery circulation was indeed impressive, the various atriums botanically interesting but almost frightening in a deliberately fashioned way, as if those spaces had been drawn up to awaken dormant instincts – and in the most primeval way imaginable. The first time she’d stepped out to peer down into one of the swimming pools she’d felt the hooded eyes of silent predators lurking behind each and every frond; soon she’d felt naked and exposed and – hunted – and couldn’t wait to get back inside, back into the relative comfort of Ted’s insidiously dark living room.
“I don’t know how you can stand to live in a place like this,” she said as she stepped inside to the relative safety of the living room again.
‘Because I love how it makes you feel,’ he’d wanted to say, but of course he never could say such a simple truth to her.“Oh, you get used to the eccentricities,” he sighed at last – though somewhat remorsefully.
“I couldn’t do it. Never. Not in a million years.”
She thought Ted’s smile was a little odd just then. Or…more than odd.
Debra’s bedroom was located in one of the two-story towers, and there was a small study-sitting room on the ground level and a library marching up beside the stairway to her second floor sleeping room. Her studio now had hidden cameras installed everywhere – except for the bathroom, and a bank of Beta-Max VCRs kept a running log of any and all movement in her spaces. Tilly sat with Ted and watched the recording from the night before, still not sure what to expect, but when Debra disappeared from her bed Tilly felt her world lurch sideways.
“What on earth just happened?” she sighed, startled.
“She told me – this time – that she was in an ocean and there were icebergs everywhere. Apparently when she goes there she’s with a killer whale. I gather it’s the same one each time.”
“The same one? What do you mean?”
“Every time, well, you know, she’s with the same orca.”
“Are you saying this has happened more than once?”
“She told me it started in the other house and has been going on ever since.”
“Theodore! This is preposterous! Du begynder at opføre dig ligesom din far! ”
“Og hvad hvis jeg er det? Ville det være så slemt? ” he screamed in return, his face turning an angry sort of red.
She pulled herself inward, protecting herself from this unexpected reaction, then she turned to her son: “How long have you felt this way?” she asked softly, walls of professional distance sliding into place.
“Don’t you dare pull that goddamn psychotherapist bullshit on me, Mother!”
“You resent me for the divorce even now, don’t you?” she cried, wilting under the furnace of his cold gray eyes.
“Even now? Mom, there’s not a day since we left San Francisco that I haven’t blamed you! And that I haven’t hated you for what…”
“That is so unfair!”
“Unfair? And you – a shrink…think it’s fair that walking away from your husband, because he had a, a mental illness, was, was somehow the right thing to do? And you call that unfair…?”
“We were ruining each other, Ted.”
“In sickness and in health, Mother. Those are the words, remember?”
“He released me, Ted. He knew what was coming next.”
“And yet, look at him now? You call that…”
“We have better medications now, better care…”
“Care he should have gotten from you, his wife!”
She turned away, knew he was right, yet she knew she was right too. A classic double bind, no way out. She turned to face her son again and sighed. “What would you have me do, Ted?”
“There’s nothing that can undo the past, Mother. Nothing we can do. We can only finish what you set out to do with father…to tear him down – until nothing of us remains.”
“Is that what you think? Ted? Really?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think anymore, Mother. I asked you to come over and look at these tapes because I want to know what you think I should do.”
Tilly pulled back from the brink and nodded as his words took hold and registered. “You said she has encounters with people of some kind?”
“Very tall, covered in feathers. Pink feathers.”
Tilly laughed at that. “Ted, this all sounds like a little girl’s fantasy. Surely you don’t think…”
“Of everything I know about Debra, Mother, the one thing she has never done is lie to me, about anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. People lie when they fear something – isn’t that what you always told me? That lies are a kind of response to something we’ve done, or even not done. So…I’ve simply removed anger from our lives, and so in a way I think I’ve removed fear. With no fear truth can flourish, right? I seem to recall hearing you say that once or twice,” he said, his voice full of bitter irony.
“Oh, Ted, if only our lives could be so simple…”
Ted shrugged. “I’m an expert in anger and fear, Mother. I grew up watching Father’s fear. And the anger you showered on him as a result.”
She shook her head, trying to keep her focus. “The best thing we can do, Ted, is to monitor these images and see if these creatures present themselves. I cannot, however, imagine that anything like this is even possible.”
“And if this is all some kind of elaborate fantasy? Then what?”
“Then we will take her to the clinic and let a pediatric specialist talk to her.”
“Do you have someone in mind?”
“I do,” Tilly said. “Amanda Patterson. She is most gifted, especially with girls.”
“Call her. Now. Have her join us for dinner tonight.”
+++++
Amanda Patterson was a psychiatrist, Dublin trained – and a kind of wild Irish beauty permeated everything about her. She knew Tilly Sorensen professionally, of course, but had never interacted socially with her so she was more than a little curious about this sudden invitation. Then…she heard words about Tilly’s granddaughter and possible hallucinatory episodes and everything slipped into place. This wasn’t a social call. This was work, she sighed. And she smiled, because that made sense.
She’d heard of Ted Sorensen, of course. He was one of the most feared personalities in Hollywood, a man who seemed to relish destroying the careers of anyone who stood in his way. And like everyone else on the West Side, she’d heard of this house. The House With No Windows.
Which of course told her everything she needed to know about the situation. Here was a man who had walled himself off from the world, from having to witness the consequences of his reign of terror. She imagined a little girl raised in such a house, a frail creature full of fear and lying to save her skin time after time, day after day. And night after night? Might she also not be a victim of sexual abuse, too?
But then wouldn’t her grandmother be complicit, too?
Oh, what an interesting evening this was going to be!
+++++
They met at house, while Debra was still at school. Something about a lacrosse game.
Ted told Patterson about his recent conversations with Debra, about the pink feathered visitors coming in the night, then he told her about the disappearance that had been captured on the video feed and about what he’d discovered in the shower…
…and Patterson seemed a little confused by that…
“You mean you actually found kelp around her leg?”
“I did, yes.”
“And you said you smelled seawater? In her shower?”
“Yes.”
“So, is it not possible that she has discovered how to cut-off the video feed, and that she planted these items beforehand so that she could pull off this little ruse?”
“But…why?” Ted asked.
“For attention, Mr. Sorensen. Perhaps because she feels neglected in some way?”
His mind reached out to thoughts he’d only recently had, thoughts of ignoring her needs, and while Patterson’s words hit him, and hard, he couldn’t imagine Debra doing something like that. Not just for some attention.
+++++
During her freshman year at Harvard-Westlake Debra asked her father for permission to go on the school’s annual ski trip up to Mammoth Mountain, and Ted smiled when he remembered his first such trip. Good memories from those worst of times, not long after his parents split, and yet somehow it was those memories that carried him through the worst of it all.
“Of course you can,” he told her. “Funny, but I had no idea you were interested in skiing…?”
“Oh, yes, ever since Dina mentioned it once I’ve wanted to learn.”
“Dina? You mean my architect?”
“Yes, of course.”
“She mentioned skiing?”
“Yes. She asked if we wanted to go with her up to Lake Tahoe.”
“We? You mean she asked us?”
“Yes. You didn’t seem interested.”
“You know,” he sighed, “I only went a couple of times. I was never any good at sports, I never had the patience to learn, I guess.”
“I think the mountains must be wonderful.”
“We haven’t been? Up to Tahoe, I mean?”
And right away, when she shook her head, Ted knew that on so many basic levels he’d failed as a parent. He wanted to turn and feel Kat next to him, wanted to feel her steady hand on his, and he missed her most at times like this.
But Debra went on her ski trip and when she came back she seemed a different person.
There were the superficial things, of course – the sunburned cheeks and the healthy glow first among the things he spotted – but there were other, deeper changes, as well.
“You look like you had a good time,” he said when she bounced back into the House With No Windows.
“You look pale, Father. Like you need to get out in the sun.”
He had shrugged indifferently. “How’d you like skiing?” he asked.
“It was hard at first but on the third day, I don’t know, it almost felt like flying. Like I was a bird and I was drifting on air currents.”
He leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands over his chest. “I remember that. Fun, isn’t it?”
“Fun? It was more than fun, Father. There are people up there who live like that. They ski every day, they’re out there in the sun and the air and the sky is a part of their lives…”
“And our life isn’t, Debra. We have a different destiny.”
Her eyes narrowed a bit when she heard him speak those words, and perhaps because she had just come in from the sun and the wind was still in her hair his words seemed contrived, almost hollow. Yet in the next instant she understood her father was missing something, like his life was devoid – of life. She had lived her life completely walled off from this other world, yet she’d also been surrounded by music, and musicians, all her life. Musicians who, by and large, worked for her father. Well, for one of the recording studios her father owned.
Folk singers, rock ’n rollers, new wave and punk. She’d seen most of the heavy hitters at one time or another, sometimes in the studio but also at concerts – when her father felt compelled to attend, anyway. And she remembered something one of the hard-line ayatollahs in Iran had said once, when he banned rock ’n roll from Iranian radio stations.
In such music could be found the devil’s lair.
And at first she’d laughed, but soon enough she understood and she stopped laughing.
There was truth inside the rebellious spirit music conveyed, truth found in the same kind of Romanticism that had popularized Byron’s poetry and probably Jesus’s sermon on the mount. The truth they spoke was a universal truth and the truth had to come out, had to be set free – only in the way best suited to the moment. Of course the ayatollahs were terrified of The Beatles. There was truth in such music, the truth of the human condition, and those scared old men knew what could bring down their whole house of cards.
And standing there in her father’s house she suddenly realized that her father was scared, the same kind of scared. Scared of what was “out there” – which meant he was scared of things he could not control. Which led her to the single most terrifying thought she’d ever had: her father was scared because he could not control her, not even the music she listened to.
Her life?
Her…life? Is that it?
Because ever since his parents had come undone he’d lost control of his life and he’d been trying to get everything all neat and tidy ever since.
But…does that really make since?
Mom died, they didn’t get divorced, so…
Mom died? So in a way she left…him. Is that when he lost control?
But that wasn’t his fault. And if it wasn’t his fault what was the point of trying to control the uncontrollable? Because…that’s what death is, isn’t it? But no, trying to keep someone you love safe and out of harm’s way isn’t unreasonable. But, oh, what was that song? Question? A question of balance? Was that it? Had he simply lost his way?
“Dad?” she said.
“Yes darlin’…what is it?”
“Something happened.”
He looked up at her, looked at the rosy glow on her cheeks once again. “Oh?”
“I met a boy.”
He smiled, but his hands started to shake a little. “And does he have a name?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing like that, Dad. He was sitting beside me in the van and he fell asleep on my shoulder. I wasn’t expecting to feel what I felt.”
He relaxed – a little – and he pointed to the chair across from his desk. “Tell me about him,” he said, gently.
“He’s a senior, he got an early admission letter from Yale.”
“And he’s cute?”
She nodded sheepishly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“And let me guess. He’s a good skier and he wanted to know if you could go back up to Mammoth with him next weekend?”
She nodded. “His parents will be there too.”
“Uh-huh. I’m just curious, but do I fit into this equation somewhere?”
“I was wondering if, well, if you wanted to come too.”
He grinned. “Is that what you were wondering?”
“Yes.”
“Deb…I do not remember how to ski, nor do I have the slightest interest in relearning.”
“Okay.”
“But why don’t you have this boy’s parents give me a call and we can see about you going with them.”
“Really! That’d be the boss, Dad!”
“The boss?”
But he did go skiing with her that weekend, and several more weekends that winter. Though of course she never knew.
+++++
Amanda Patterson quietly watched the bank of monitors as Debra fell asleep, Tilly sitting beside her in the little control room. Ted remained in his office, not wanting to watch anything that might possibly unfold – again – because he was afraid what it might mean for his daughter. One way or another.
An hour passed, then another – before all the monitors went out. Then all the lights in the house…
“Ted! Come!” his mother cried as she stood and groped for the stairway. “Something’s happening!”
But it was almost pitch-black inside the house and everyone found it difficult to move through the darkness. Ted made it to the stairs first and started up but soon the way ahead was apparent. Deb’s room was suffused with pulsing shades of pink and blue and a faint crackling sound helped him find his way, until all three were standing in her room.
And a small, translucent sphere hovered in the air just above the girl’s bed. One moment the sphere glowed pink and in the next a pale lime green aura filled the room…
And Debra was gone. Not in the bedroom and not in the bathroom. Gone.
“Sweet Jesus,” Patterson whispered as she stepped back from the hovering sphere, “what is that?”
Ted leaned close to the sphere, his eyes at first lost in wonder – then filling with tears. “That’s my wife,” he said, just before their eyes closed. Just before they disappeared.
Here begins Part the Third. Dividing up Ch. 12 into several interlinking sub-chapters. Sorry. Think of it as more opportunities for cardamom tea.
Here’s the latest from Tears for Fears, pre-released last week from their new album The Tipping Point (to be released late February 2022). Is this as good as I think it is?
Another emergency eye surgery yesterday. I know this is getting old but it’s really beginning to slow me down. Anyway, enjoy the music and I hope this part of the arc answers a few lingering questions. Or makes you ask a few new ones…!
Part III: The House With No Windows
Chapter 12.1
Beverly Hills, California 12 August 1983
She was a strange girl, all brown-eyed empathy with a soul as big and ever-expanding as the universe. You could not sit with her for any length of time and not feel the peace she exuded. After her mother passed everyone gathered protectively around her, yet it was the little girl who reached out and most protected those around her. Her father most of all.
Because Ted Sorensen came undone for a while. Simply and completely.
And in the aftermath he turned inside himself. He drove up the slot canyon to the house on Collingwood and all that glass mocked him. His anger and his sorrow. Only now more than ever he did not want anyone or anything to see him like this. To see his mortality. This inhuman weakness.
But the little girl understood.
He purchased an old house on Foothill just a block from Sam’s house. A huge old house hidden within a series of rambling gardens, the place had been perfect for the silent film matinee idol who had built it fifty years before, but Ted hated the house and even before he found an architect he tore it down.
But then he found an architect – The Architect. Dina Marlowe was her name.
She was a wild, powerful creature, a clear-eyed disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright that scores of local architects had long ago taken to calling Frank Lloyd Wrong. She loved that. She loved their loathing, their self-righteous protestations to everything she drew. She walked over the old lot with Ted and listened to him as he talked about Katharine and her cancer and the total helplessness he’d felt for almost two years. She was a good listener, too.
She drove him around LA and looked at several of Wright’s houses, as well as several she’d designed, and soon she began to picture in her mind exactly what Ted Sorensen wanted. Not what he needed, but what he wanted. Then she tried to get him to see the difference between the two.
She lived down on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, a little prominence of land that juts out into the Pacific and that’s located just a few miles south of Los Angeles International. Close – but not touching – as living in PV was living a life apart, especially in those days. She rode a horse to her studio. She lived not far from where the writer Thomas Mann had lived when he came to California – before he came to his senses. She lived in a rambling house of her own design, a sprawling series of soaring copper-roofed hexagons crafted of redwood and glass, and where a series of flagstoned terraces floated like lily pads down to the rocks where the earth and the sea came together.
Dina Marlowe was almost twice Ted’s age yet she’d never married, never had children of her own. She invited Ted and the little brown eyed girl out to her house – so that together father and daughter could feel what expansive architecture was all about. Such was the power of her house that prospective clients lucky enough to earn an invitation to her house invariably came away impressed enough to sign with her on the spot. Yet oddly enough she rarely invited prospective clients to her house. She rarely deemed them worthy of her work and she didn’t care what other people thought about that.
But Ted Sorensen was different.
Because Ted Sorensen was the face of the new Hollywood. Daring to break with the past, Sorensen had broken free of all the old paradigms, the light comedies and the formulaic westerns. He was already behind several groundbreaking sci-fi epics and he had quickly begun bringing in new talent – both behind the camera as well as scores fresh faces in front. For years Paramount had fallen behind the other studios in LA – but in just a few short years all that was in the past.
And if she could get Sorensen as a client then new doors would open for her work, not just in LA but around the world. So…a new conundrum emerged.
She knew if she created what Sorensen wanted her career would be in tatters, that she would truly become a laughingstock, and that she might as well retire after her work was done for him.
And when they’d driven around LA looking at Wright’s houses he had expressed interest in only one. The Ennis House. A house that at its best looked like a Mayan temple, and that typically aroused feelings of outright dread, like something lifted right out of a dystopian Babylonian nightmare. But at least the Ennis House had windows.
And Ted Sorensen wanted no visible windows, no way for anyone to see inside his new home. The house would, Sorensen demanded, literally turn in on itself. Yet while all the exterior would present an impenetrable wall to the world, the interior would be pure, unobstructed glass. And every room in the house, every single space, would look inward. Inward onto a series of lush garden pools, like some impossible landscape dug up from a primeval rainforest and transported intact to Beverly Hills California – and literally just a few hundred feet from Sunset Boulevard.
Sorensen seemed drawn to the monolithic power of Wright’s Ennis House, the impossibility of finding something so incongruously out of place where the exact opposite was not simply expected, but demanded. And even Dina Marlowe knew that when the authorities in Beverly Hills took one look at her final drawings they would shit all over themselves. Horrified. Furious. How dare anyone even contemplate building something like this – in Beverly Hills!
Which was why she had invited Ted and his daughter to spend an afternoon at her home on the cliffs.
+++++
She had a small house attached to the main house and an old French couple lived there; they looked after the house and cooked when guests came and when her draftsmen came around after hours the old couple cooked for them, too – and important impromptu gatherings that often sprang-up there on the cliffs.
When the Sorensens came the old couple prepared a simple dinner of salads and artichokes and fresh seafood caught that morning, and Debra walked around the various swimming pools – and the waterfalls that joined them into a whole – amazed that anyone could live so close to the sea. She stood, entranced, as dolphins and whales swam by just beyond the rocks, entranced as swirling clouds of gulls cried over the rocks below. In a life already full of treasured memories that afternoon on the cliffs was the one she would claim as her first.
Dina Marlowe’s draftsmen had created two sets of drawings based on her preliminary sketches; the first set was for a more traditional “prairie house” that in some ways resembled Wright’s Taliesin East, his second home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin – where Wright had started his first architecture school. She created this set of plans because she’d been a student of Wright’s and knew this would more than likely be the last time that she’d be able to create such an homage.
The second set of plans she’d spent more time on. She was already beginning to understand the role this commission would have on her career and, perhaps, she wanted to make a statement. This second set looked like the Ennis House – but on steroids, and without one single window visible from the street. Her blocks would use the same “Usonian” concrete block construction and her version incorporated similar geometric design motifs both in the blocks and in the overall design. One of her draftsmen made a quarter inch scale model of this plan out of heavy foam-board and from the street the house looked more like an ancient Babylonian ziggurat than Mayan temple, yet even in cardboard the form possessed a heavy, almost brooding presence that defied easy acquiescence. Ted Sorensen looked at the model and at once felt revolted and curious – just as Dina knew it would.
“Dear God,” he whispered as he looked at the thing, “what will people think when they see this?”
“Terror would be my guess, Ted,” Dina Marlowe sighed. “My first impression, once I saw the model, was that it looks like a place where human sacrifices once took place.”
Ted looked at her, expecting to see a smile or hear a laugh, but no – her face was a blank mask.
“Where did this come from?” he asked her.
“I listened to you, Ted. This is what you asked for. It’s a home where a person who seeks to deny their own humanity goes to lick their wounds.”
In an instant Sorensen grew furious with the audacity of her insight…
…then he fell back into her words…
“I listened to you.”
And this from an artist who made her living by listening to her clients.
He gathered his sense of himself and walked around the model again and again, then she leaned over and pulled the roofs off, revealing the series of interior courtyards and pools. “There’s no way to model the landscaping but I tried to render those here,” she said as she turned and almost theatrically uncovered three renderings of the house done in colored pencil – Wright’s favorite media for presenting renderings to clients.
“From the street about all a passersby might see was is forest, actually three layers of forest – to be more precise – with each inner layer taller than the one before. Various towers and sub-towers will be visible both above or through the forest, but never the house in its entirety, not from any angle…”
Sorensen stepped close and looked at the renderings and only then did he nod his head in dawning appreciation. “It’s majestic,” he sighed, “and utterly ominous.”
“It’s what you asked for, Ted.”
“It’s perfect,” he said as he turned to her, smiling.
“I know,” she said, sure this would amount to nothing more or less than her ruin.
And in that she could not have been more wrong.
+++++
Construction began almost as soon as a contractor willing to take on the commission could be found, while the city’s planning commission proved to be less an issue than Marlowe had feared – but only because she had no idea how much money – in the form of pure, unadulterated bribes – Sorensen had been willing to pay for a construction permit.
Literally thousands of the various intricately layered concrete blocks had to be formed and poured, and this proceeded as the first layer of the forest was transplanted. There would be almost no lawn adjacent to the sidewalk, at least not in any traditional meaning of the word. Though within the first few few in from the sidewalk there would indeed be some grass, almost immediately low, dense broad-leafed palm-like trees would define the first outer wall of the forest. While this planting got under underway the primary contractor moved-in and excavated the basements and subfloor footings, and within a few weeks the first walls started to appear.
And then the first wave of complaints started to trickle in to the city planning office. “What is this thing?” seemed to be the gist of these first missives, and the city replied with a form letter explicitly stating that the plans had passed the city’s usual review process with flying colors. Most people were satisfied with this and let the matter drop.
Then the second layer of the forest was planted, and the front elevation of the house began to take shape. People began driving out of their way to see the new Babylonian ziggurat taking shape on Foothill. Traffic at times backed up as people stopped their cars and gawked. Until someone noticed this appeared to be a house with no windows…and wasn’t that a code violation? More letters were sent to the planning office, then matters escalated when members of the planning commission were summoned to a meeting in the City Manager’s office.
Of course the city manager had been bought off as well, so what followed was more a strategy session to reassure the public that the house did in fact have the required number of windows and that everything was in fact okay with the design review process. But then even more people complained, because most people appeared quite uncomfortable with the idea that an ancient temple of some kind was being constructed right in the middle of a prime residential neighborhood, and it looked exactly like the sort of place where human sacrifices might take place.
Evangelical Christian leaders got involved next, alerted by parishioners that a temple dedicated to reviving the practice of ritual human sacrifice was being constructed in the heart of Los Angeles, and then these same evangelicals appeared in Palos Verdes, in the form of marching protesters outside of Dina Marlowe’s studio. She met with the gathered religious leaders and told them the story of the original Ennis House, as well as the handful of other houses around LA that Wright had designed that were also called Neo-Mayan by critics of art and architecture.
But when one of the evangelical pastors asked Marlowe if her new design was in fact intended to be a religious temple of some sort she scoffed at the idea, then she asked the pastor to drive around LA and look at Wright’s other Usonian houses. When pressed further by this pastor – he repeated his original question and added something particularly stupid about Wright having been an advocate of human sacrifice – and she laughed in the man’s face and called him a “congenital idiot…”
“Which is, I believe, on the front page of this morning’s Times,” Henry Carmichael said as Ted settled into the back of his limo.
Ted picked up the newspaper and skimmed the article, at one point laughing so hard his eyes watered – even as Henry drove the Lincoln out Melrose to the studio. “This couldn’t be going better,” Ted sighed as he looked at his reflection in the car’s window – as he turned inward and thought about all the hideous monsters out there in the world who had no idea what he had in store for them. He smiled at his father’s reflection in his mind’s eye, then leaned back and laughed when his father laughed at them too.
+++++
Teachers reacted to Debra the way everyone else had: they were drawn to her, to her eyes, and when they made contact and stared into her eyes they almost always reported feeling something like waves of complete peace-of-mind breaking over them. Even students in her classes had no idea what to think when they interacted with her on the playground. She was just…different. Bullies tried to pick on her, to intimidate her and she would smile gently and look at them – and her teachers watched as her bullies wilted like flowers under a fierce noonday sun.
One morning at early recess she was sitting on a bench talking to a friend when a small rabbit hopped over and sat beneath her dangling feet. Then another rabbit, and another and another came out of the bushes and sat there on the ground beneath the bench, looking up at her as if expecting something from her…so she went down to them and sat with them; within moments rabbits were crawling all over her legs then cuddling on her lap, and everyone on theplayground – students and staff – stared in awestruck wonder at the sight of her. More rabbits came to her until dozens surrounded her, yet by then most faced outward as if they were taking a defensive stance – as if they were gathering there to protect her.
And day after day the rabbits came to her. Until one day, after a teacher called, her father came to see these strange goings-on.
And the rabbits came and sat beside Debra after she sat on the ground, and they remained there until her father came. They ran away then, and they did not come back.
+++++
She loved him, of course. She could see the goodness in him. She could see past the monster everyone else saw.
The first time she saw the House With No Windows she did not know what to think. In a way the imposing hulk of the small towers peeking out of the little forest reminded her of one of her father’s movies, and she expected stunted little creatures to come crawling out to greet her. Two streams ran through the forest in the front of the house and two glass bridges crossed over the running water, and she didn’t realize this was to be her new home because she felt like she was on one of her father’s film sets.
The front walk wound slowly through the forest to a small opening, and then, after a short turn not visible until then, a door appeared…and that first time there her father and Dina Marlowe took her inside to show her around.
The same blocks on the outside made up the inner walls, and the floors appeared to be highly polished concrete stained a deep mahogany brown. A fireplace as big as a kitchen drew her eye inward, until she saw the forest atrium just outside the living room and she couldn’t help but run to the glass wall and look out there.
“Can we swim in that?” she asked Dina. “The water looks very dark, Dina, almost like a pool in a river, only at night.”
“Yes you can, Debra. This is just like any other swimming pool, only the inside of this pool is dark so it will look more like a pool within a stream. Do you like it?”
She nodded but remained unconvinced. “It feels very strange, Dina. Like some kind of power is hidden inside.”
“Inside? The water?” her father asked. “Really? What do you mean by that, Debra?”
But the girl simply shook her head, and slowly – as she turned and looked at Dina. “I don’t know, father,” she said as she looked around the house and the garden pools again. “I’m really not sure.”
But she did know, and she was sure. She had seen a place just like this once upon a time, though by the time she stood there inside the house the ‘here and now’ felt like it must have been a very long time ago. She looked into the dark water again, and then into Dina’s eyes all while trying to understand what she was feeling – again. Echoes? Something like echoes of another time and place, feeling the gut punch of knowing absolutely that she had been here before.
But she understood it was a long time ago, and very far from this place.
+++++
She read all the time. And she remembered everything she read. Word for word. Page by page.
When her classmates were reading Dick and Jane books aloud in her first grade class she was finishing up Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, because that was one of her father’s favorite movies. The next book she read was Mann’s Death in Venice and she struggled with the idea that an old man could be attracted to someone so young, but Dina had given her the book. She asked her father about the von Aschenbach character and he told her that many men in their 40s and 50s became confused about their place in the world when their bodies began changing…
“What about women? Do they become confused too?”
Her father nodded. “I think so, yes, but maybe you should ask your grandmother.”
“What is a psychiatrist, father?”
“Well, do you know how some people become ill? Like when they catch a cold?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Well, sometimes peoples’ brains become ill. Sometimes it is a kind of sickness, while there are other times when a person’s brain develops that way.”
“You mean genetics, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Chromosomes, DNA, genetic codes and markers? Those things?”
Ted looked at her, now only seven years old but already so conversant in so many subjects. “Yes, those things. Where did you hear about those? At school?”
“No, the other teachers.”
He looked up from his dinner, looked her in the eye: “What other teachers?”
“The ones who come to me in the night.”
He felt cold dread. A piercing heaviness gripped his chest. He began to sweat a little, too. “People come to you? In the night?”
“Yes, father, but I am unsure if they are people.”
“What does that mean, Debra? What do they look like?”
“They are usually very tall, too tall to stand in my room, and most of them are covered in feathers. Pink feathers.”
“You’ve seen more than one?”
“Not usually, but sometimes.”
He was watching her closely then, looking into her eyes, looking for evasiveness or any other signs she was making this up – but when he saw only frank honesty he decided he’d call his mother after he put her to bed. “Do they stay in the room with you at night?”
“Usually, but we have been to the ocean, and once they took me to see a star.”
“A star?”
“Yes, only it wasn’t a star. It was some kind of machine.”
Another brief chapter, the last in this second part of the story. Cardamom tea, anyone?
Part II: The Broken Road
Chapter 11
Hollywood, California 7 July 1977
“Take Beverly, it’ll be faster this time of day,” Ted said to his driver. Kat’s OB’s office had just called; her contractions were getting closer so it was time for him to dash to the hospital. Cedars-Sinai wasn’t even four miles away but in noonday traffic on a Thursday it could easily take a half hour – or more – and Ted was already nervous, even before he made it to the Paramount limo. His palms were sweating and his stomach was twisted up in hard little knots, every one of them on fire. “Could you turn up the air, Henry?”
Henry Carmichael smiled and nodded as he turned the Lincoln onto Melrose. He could do this drive in his sleep, and probably had more than once over the last twenty-seven years, but even so he had to take care – if only because Ted Sorensen already had a brutal reputation around the studio. You didn’t cross him, you didn’t make him angry, and you sure didn’t contradict anything he said – not if you wanted to keep your job. Funny, too, because the kid was still just that: a kid. He’d just graduated from the film school at ‘SC but already the word around the back lots was that this kid was some kind of wunderkind, brilliant – but ruthless – and let’s not mention he’d married the boss’s daughter last month. And now here he was, in a city full of power players the kid was already swimming at the top of the food chain. Better still, the kid was shaking up the old, established pecking order; firing people left and right, pissing-off has-been actors who’d been at Paramount for decades, getting rid of the deadwood while clearing the way ahead for fresh talent.
Henry already liked Ted, even felt loyal to him. He liked driving him around the city, just like he’d enjoyed driving the Old Man around. Still, the fact of the matter was simple enough: Henry was still working for Sam Gold. He was still filing written reports on everything the kid said and did while being driven around town. Henry’s ultimate loyalty was, after all, reserved for The Boss. And it’d been earned, too. Sam Gold was a Mensch…with a capital M, the best of the best.
Henry took Melrose to Fairfax to Beverly and made it to the hospital in less than ten minutes, impressing even Ted, but even before he could get around and open the kid’s door, Ted was out and sprinting for the entry.
The Old Man had done pretty much the same thing when Katharine came into the world, but that’s what Henry liked about working for the studio. LA was constantly reinventing itself, spreading out into the valleys that branched out like vines from Hollywood, the real beating heart of the city, yet the studios were already bastions of tradition. Whole ecosystems had grown up and flourished around each of the major studios, but Paramount was the grandfather of them all – and in a way Hollywood was Hollywood because of Paramount. And not just Hollywood…Beverly Hills, too. Then BelAir and Brentwood, and even the far-flung Palisades, everything because of Paramount. Andalong with the other studios, out of the orange groves and lemon trees – out of all that nothingness – new traditions sprang up – almost overnight. Traditions that developed into networks as intricately powerful as anything ever seen in ancient Rome, all in the span of a single lifetime. The world had never seen anything quite like it, and everyone everywhere was still trying to comes to terms with what exactly Hollywood really meant.
Yet one thing was certain. Hollywood was power. Sheer, unadulterated power.
And it looked like a ruthless kid was moving in to take over.
+++++
Debra Sorensen came into the world at seven minutes past seven in the evening, and from that moment on she became the center of Theodore Sorensen’s waking existence. In a way, she became his salvation.
And from the beginning of her time here, there was something strange about the little girl.
She never cried. When people came to see her in the hospital the baby would look at her visitors and an unexpected calm would come for them. When Katharine first held her daughter she felt a peace fall over her that she had never experienced before.
Ted held her and at once grew terrified, almost rigid with fear, yet the longer he held her the more irresistible her gaze became – and the more at ease he became.
When Sam Gold held her close the little girl reached up and touched the side of his face and he cried for hours after, while Debra’s nurses all said they’d never seen anything like these actions and reactions before. Strangers heard stories about the new little baby girl and would go to the window in the maternity ward and seek out her eyes, and everyone reported feeling the same kind of never-before-experienced calm, and after one psychiatrist heard about the phenomenon she went to see for herself; perhaps this physician described Debra’s effect on people best when she related that something like an existential peace came to her when she looked at the little girl, and into her eyes.
Debra had brown hair and gentle brown eyes, and her skin was a little more olive than white – though the bridge of her nose was intensely freckled – something no one could account for. Her birth weight was seven pounds – seven ounces, a simple fact no one seemed to find in the least extraordinary.
Father, mother, and daughter went home to their new house at the end of Collingwood Place, a boxy monstrosity designed by an architect with a thing for huge glass rectangles and dull black steel. There were three swimming pools in the back yard, and not a single blade of grass in sight. The house was clinging to the side of a canyon and appeared ready to fly away at a moments notice. The view from the tiered back patios was stupendous, and on smog-free days the little girl could see from Catalina Island to the Malibu Hills from her bedroom. She lived the first seven years of her life in this little glass and steel airey, perched up there on the side of the canyon – ready to fly away at a moments notice.
+++++
In a way, Ted Sorensen came of age up there, too.
He disposed of his little green BMW after his return from Berlin, in pointed discussions vowing to never again purchase anything with even the slightest hint of German origin. He began to study the Holocaust, he made charitable donations to homes in Israel that cared for orphaned children, Jewish children recovered from Soviet Russia, helpless children with their own harrowing tales to tell. If down and out actors found their way to him looking for work he listened to their stories, but some actors received more attention than others.
He went to first one country club then another – only to be told that Jews need not apply – for membership or for a job, not even as a janitor. The same was true all around Southern California, from yacht clubs to hunting preserves. When he learned that there were only a few politicians who listened to the concerns of their Jewish constituents he began to wonder where the difference between German Hate and American Hate resided. He soon decided that the only way to take care of the problem was to beat the Haters at their own game.
He saw in Sam Gold echoes of his father’s paranoia; both had spent their lives looking over their shoulders, looking for Hate in all their passing shadows. They never looked ahead, they never confronted their fears head-on. They ran, they avoided. More than anything else they lived in fear of drawing attention to their jewishness – and Ted Sorensen was done with that. He wasn’t buying into that way of life. Not for him. Not for Katharine. And most especially not for his daughter.
So he joined a country club that was derisively known as ‘that place that takes Jews,’ and he bought his way onto the board of directors. He got investors, some with really big money, to come in and within a few years the dowdy old place became the jewel of Southern California country clubs and everyone was welcome to join. Everyone. With the money to make the cut. The other country clubs began to languish as their anti-semitism hit the full light of day in newspapers that Sorensen invested in. Other anti-semitic organizations on the West Side met a similar fate until, one by one, these groups either disappeared – or moved to Orange County with all the other John Birchers.
He began to put the studio’s money behind space operas, then more big budget revivals of sixties television series and that put him over the top. By the early eighties and with Sam’s endorsement he took over as president and chairman of the board and now there was nothing in the world that could stop what came next.
+++++
Katharine never went to medical school. That life was never meant to be.
Sam moved to Israel, to one of his so-called compounds, though he kept the house on Alpine, for a while, anyway.
Then one night, when Debra was just six years old, Katharine found a lump in her left breast.
A short chapter here, so pour yourself a stiff one (Dr Pepper on the rocks, anyone?) and settle in for a quickie.
Odd little juxtaposition. About an hour after I posted chapter nine word came out regarding the hostage situation at the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. Hate never sleeps.
Part II: The Broken Road
Chapter 10
Tel Aviv, Israel 22 November 1976
Most guests invited to Anders Sorensen’s marriage to Anya Eisenstadt arrived on commercial flights from California. Theodore Sorensen, as well as Sam and Katharine Gold, arrived by private jet, in this case by Sam’s Gulfstream II, and in a curious way this conspicuous arrival set the tone surrounding Ted’s introduction to Israel. He was accorded a different level of deference by state bureaucracies that the others did not experience, and none of these little things escaped Ted’s notice. Power was power, he was learning, yet passive displays of the symbols and accoutrements of power often meant that more obvious exercises of gross power were often unnecessary.
And somehow, within a day of his arrival in Tel Aviv, all of the invited guests knew that Ted had arrived by private jet. Unknown to these guests, however, was Katharine Gold’s ‘condition’ – for she was now quite pregnant – though still barely ‘showing’. Also, though Tilly Sorensen had been invited to the wedding she chose not to come, for – oddly enough – she was still rather angry about the whole second marriage thing. The Callahans chose not to attend, as well – for Imogen had never felt comfortable with the Sorensen’s divorce and she did not want to be seen taking sides. Tilly therefore spent her Thanksgiving at the Callahan house in Potrero Hills.
Anders had asked Saul Rosenthal to stand with Ted under the chuppah, while Anya, a recent emigre from Soviet Armenia and without parents, had no onto stand with. For Anya was indeed alone, and it was becoming clear to all concerned that Anya had been characterized by the authorities as some sort of ‘mail-order bride’… She was certainly much younger than Anders, and quite good looking too, but little else was known of her background by Anders’ friends and associates.
Ted was not amused when he learned of this, yet had he known more about the precarious history of Armenian Jews he might have at the very least been more understanding. As it was, once Ted heard the first faint rumblings surrounding Anya’s presumed role in these proceedings he grew more skeptical by the hour. More skeptical and, in both word and deed, less understanding.
Yet for some reason his father seemed quite happy when he was standing beside Anya, and with Sam’s steady counsel never far away Ted took a cautious ‘wait and see’ approach. Kat, for her part, was as gracious as could be to Anya – which of course meant that Anya was soon never far away from either Anders or Katharine. For her part, Katharine would soon become the tiny, empathetic voice whispering in Ted’s ear, her counsel a mirror image of her father’s: watch; listen; say nothing you might regret; smile – even when you don’t feel like smiling.
Ted spent almost every moment standing beside Sam Gold; Katharine listened to Anya Tarkov, who happened to speak flawless English – as well as French, German, and the Germanic Yiddish of Ashkenazi Jews – for it turned out that parts of her family had once prospered in cities such as Heidelberg and Copenhagen, before being forced into exile – first to the Soviet Union and thence to Armenia. She came from a family of academics and physicians; Anya was, at 35 years of age, already a trained cardio-thoracic surgeon. Katharine soon began to feel that of all the people she’d met so far in Israel, Anya Eisenstadt was by far the most cultured she’d talked to. It wasn’t long before Kat began to understand just how delightful Anya truly was, and how truly blessed Anders must have felt when he first met her.
Yet Ted rarely listened to Kat when she spoke of all this, at least when Anya’s background was the chosen topic of conversation. Worse still, Ted was cool, almost distant and preoccupied around her, and it wasn’t long before Anders began to notice.
Katharine, ever the empath, took this deterioration seriously, enough to talk to her own father about Ted. Sam began to watch the boy, trying to understand all the varieties of his antipathy, and the more he watched the more he began to see a complex deterioration of the relationship between father and son – and this he simply did not understand.
Was it a basic failing within the boy? Could Ted simply not understand the emotional complexities of survivor’s guilt? Did the boy, at root, simply have no frame of reference to understand the Jewish experience of the camps? Of the continuing diaspora? Were America’s schools doing such a poor job of conveying the tortured landscape of Hate?
The ceremony was never meant to be a lavish affair but as Kat – and Sam – learned more about Anya the scale of the post-nuptial celebration increased in both scale and social importance. Sam talked to people. Government ministers took note. Various important people’s names were added to the guest list – and all this happened over the span of a few days – so that by the time of the actual ceremony the list had grown from less than thirty names to more than a hundred, and as his father’s wedding seemed to grow in stature Ted’s acceptance of Anya seemed to grow. The event was remembered by all concerned as a happy, even a joyous affair.
Ted observed that Sam seemed to operate in Israel just as he did in Los Angeles. He was comfortable, and perhaps because Sam was well connected in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as he was LA? Ted soon learned that Sam was well connected because he gave, and quite generously, to a number of important Israeli charities – and to many Israeli politicians connected to those charities. Sam did so because he owned quite a lot of property in and around Tel Aviv, and he had purchased these properties with an eye to building residential projects. Yet he never talked about these investments. He never let on that it was his intent to immigrate to Israel as soon as he had cultivated an heir to handle his affairs in the States.
Yet what Sam Gold observed in Ted Sorensen filled his heart with foreboding. The boy had displayed all the killer instincts necessary to flourish in Hollywood; he had proven to be, in fact, a more than competent producer while Falling Water was in development. Yet there was something missing in the boy, something important, something…vital.
Ted lacked both humility and humanity. He didn’t just want power, he appeared to crave it, and not just the power to create or to build, but power for power’s sake. The boy was, in a word, dangerous.
Yet his daughter loved the boy, and she had apparently loved him enough to ‘forget’ to take her birth control pills. She loved him enough to want to have a baby with him, to put-off her studies for at least a year to have this baby with him – so at some point he had to recognize that he’d raised Katharine inside a home that valued humility and compassion, so surely her choice would reflect those values.
+++++
The Gulfstream made an unscheduled stop on the way back to California.
The jet landed in West Berlin, itself an audacious act that required serious political muscle, and which meant that the jet was met by a sizable contingent of US Army troops. Sam led Ted and his daughter to the car indicated by a light colonel, and after leaving the airport their small convoy drove into the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, and then to the Plötzensee Prison complex. The colonel escorted the group to a small brick building not far from the main administrative center and led them inside. Almost instantly someone turned on floodlights and the white painted walls seemed to come alive, as if they had a tale to tell and only lacked iron-willed souls ready to stand and listen. And to remember.
The colonel led them to the far wall and pointed to pockmarks in the brick – with a brown leather riding-crop he wielded with precision. “Bullet holes,” he said, the words a steely statement of fact. “In the early forties new prison guards were trained here, in this room.” Next he pointed to five hooks suspended from a heavy timber beam that spanned the width of the room. “Routine political executions took place in the courtyard, usually by guillotine. Jews, on the other hand, came in for special treatment. The prisoner’s hands were tied overhead and then they were suspended from these hooks. Guards used them for target practice, I understand to get new recruits used to killing unarmed human beings.”
Katharine turned and ran into her father’s arms; he sheltered her and took her back to their waiting car.
Ted stood there, entranced.
“They’ve bricked-over all the other parts of the apparatus,” the colonel continued. “They had meathooks suspended from the tracks you see up there, and the track – we assume – was chain-driven and ran in a large oval. Children were impaled on the hooks and their squirming bodies then sent along the track. They were more challenging to hit, or so I understand.”
“You’re not serious…” Ted whispered.
“Oh, similar set-ups were found in Poland. We think this facility was a ‘proof-of-concept’ operation; the walls had already been bricked over when the Russians got here, but the very same arrangement, right down to the same hardware, was found in operational condition at both Auschwitz and Treblinka. Survivor’s accounts, mainly of those carting the bodies off to crematories, fill in the blanks.”
“This is monstrous. Simply monstrous.”
“Is this your first camp?” the colonel asked, gently, knowingly.
“Yes.”
“I hate to say it, but this is nothing.”
“Nothing? How can you say that?”
“Do your research, Mr. Sorensen.”
“How can you stand it? To live here, surrounded by these monsters…?”
The colonel nodded, then he turned and looked Sorensen in the eye. “I’ve lived here for six years and I haven’t met one monster here. Not one, Mr. Sorensen. Hitler and his pals sold the German people real a bill of goods…he promised to ‘Make Germany Great Again’ and part of the mechanism of Hate they built to do that was focused on scapegoating the Jewish population here. They were a prosperous people but more importantly there were a few prominent Jewish politicians during the Republic. Those Jews were accused…”
“The stab in the back. Yeah, I’ve heard that one – and that still doesn’t explain why you think these people aren’t monsters.”
“They’re just people, Mr. Sorensen. People like you and me. Many were broke and starving and Hitler came along and told them exactly what they wanted to hear. ‘It’s not your fault! It’s the Jews! Follow me and together we will restore Germany.’ It’s the same formula would-be dictators trot out and use all the time. It goes back to Caligula and the Germanic tribes and, hell, I don’t know, it probably goes back to cold men huddled in caves, to when we first learned to kill each other. To Hate.”
“You’ve seen more things like this? These things, I mean?” Ted asked, pointing at the track mounted on the ceiling.
“Me? Yessir, I have. Funny thing, though. The first time I saw stuff like this was over in Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia, too.” The colonel chuckled a little, then shook his head. Truth is, it’s everywhere, Mr. Sorensen. Every place you find desperate people my guess is you’ll find Hate waiting in the wings, and when you find people blindly willing to follow Hate you’ll find the same kind of thing.”
Ted nodded his head slowly, then he held out his right hand. “Thank you, Colonel.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Now…we really need to get you back out to the airport…before the Russians throw a real first-class hissy-fit…”
If you’ve been reading along here for more than a few years you know that every now and then a little hiccup comes along and a new story just pops up. Well, this is a hiccup. A new story that has absolutely nothing to do with the 88th Key or Come Alive or…anything else. It just is.
And it’s about 25 pages so not real long and not too brief. Maybe time for tea? Probably.
Enjoy.
Tangent
Life is really kind of funny, ya know? Like how many unexpected things come up and slap us on the face – almost like right out of the blue – except maybe we’ve been setting out little breadcrumbs all along the way? When you look at it that way, well, that little slap on the face almost seems inevitable, kind of like we planned it that way. That would almost make a weird kind of sense if we were actually smart enough to pull something like that off. Yet it’s funnier still how many of these consequential slaps remain just out of sight – and then at just the wrong moment they strike. We go through life and never hear anything from them, but then – like meteors that narrowly miss the earth – sometimes our little breadcrumbs cruise on by and we remain blissfully unaware of how utterly close we’ve come to annihilation. Or…we come full circle and trip over our trail of breadcrumbs and despite all our so-called smarts we remain in no position to effect any sort of positive outcome. That’s just life I suppose, yet I’ve always been a little more proactive about the things I am aware of to let even the littlest things slip by. But there’s a catch here, and it’s a biggie: you have to be, at the very least, aware of the world unfurling around you. If you aren’t…well then…you have no one to blame but yourself – even if you aren’t a total control freak.
Which, of course, we all are. Yet in a way being a control freak has contributed to the nature of our success, as well as more than a few of our personal failures along the way – but that, too, is just life. After all, everyone has to be something, so why not be a control freak?
Yet through it all I keep coming back to the idea of circles.
Yeah, circles.
But cut me some slack here, because while I’m not exactly sure where I’m going I have a feeling it’s someplace interesting. Circles are like that, I guess.
+++++
Didn’t Elton John write something about taking me to the pilot for control. Yeah, that one. Take me to the pilot of your soul. You get the drift – of the song, I mean? Well, I look back on all that time in college and think I wanted to get a handle on the whole soul thing, and I did right up to the exact point in time when my brother was killed in Southeast Asia, on a dark and stormy night all his own. I know that’s when I first started thinking about circles, anyway.
See…my brother was a full-fledged member of the war corp, yet I was well on my way to becoming some kind of rock ’n roller when I got news that his life had reached an unexpected end. He’d been flying off carriers in A-4 Skyhawks; he’d been flying one of the very first missions in early ’66 to go after shipping in Haiphong Harbor – when a Russian SAM removed him from the ledger.
There was a place I used to go up north of the Golden Gate, and I drove out to that cold little beach after my dad called to let me know I didn’t have a brother anymore. Lost out there in a fog, I tried to picture him alone in the middle of the night in one of those jets, here one second and gone the next – literally just gone – and then all these other memories of him came back in a dull roar that maybe sounded a little like surf out there in the mist. Throwing the football in the backyard with him, my fingers so cold they hurt and smoke from a million wood stoves hangingin the air. Learning to drive with him by my side, all patience and so full of confidence because he was such a good teacher. Such a good friend. Maybe that’s what big brothers are supposed to be, in the world as it’s supposed to be, anyway. Friends. Role models. And sure, yeah, teachers. And Doug was all those things. I was lucky, and even then I knew it.
Because when I was a spud I had friends whose big brothers were bullies, who we avoided like the plague. You know the type, I’m sure, maybe even if you were one. But sitting out in the fog on a cold rock with Pacific tides rolling-in all I could see in my mind’s eye was some kind of missile warning light blinking red and then a few last seconds of dawning awareness – that my brother knew his life was about to end, that the light he had carried through his life was about to go out, and I wondered what he thought and felt in those last few seconds of his life. Work the problem? Fight the inevitable until the very end? I’d never know, of course.
Because a couple hundred pounds of high explosive had turned him into purple rain, little bits of death slipping into the ooze and out of my life. One more point of light switched off in a sea of flickering stars disappearing in one black hole after another.
+++++
I was playing keyboards a lot back then, kind of a college side gig to earn money for pizza. But the group I was with had cut a second album and we were getting a reputation. And that’s when I showed up for a gig with my long hair long gone. I was, I told them that afternoon, joining the Navy, headed up to Washington State for OCS and then, hopefully, on to flight school. I was following in my brother’s footsteps, you see. Walking along the remains of his circle.
I remember the looks of stupefied disbelief on faces of people I’d called friends for more than a few years, then the sense of betrayal in their downcast, red as stoned eyes. I wasn’t war corp, they cried. I was one of them. How could you do such a thing…?
I had a girlfriend, of course. Joyce. Joyce of the long red hair and deep green eyes, her batik skirts that always swept the floor. Patchouli. I remember clouds of patchouli most of all when I thought about her. I loved her, of course. As a matter of fact she taught me how to love. Not the mechanics but the soul searching embrace of love. Probably the best song on our last album together was all about her, about the way she moved, about the way she made me feel inside when she smiled at me just so. She was a light acoustic number, all gentle chords wrapped up in little love-knots, and I always felt closest to her when her music came to me.
I had a little green Porsche back then, a new 911E I’d picked up a few week before all this went down. I bought the car with the money from the album, and Joyce picked it out. In a way I guess I always thought it would be our car – because I couldn’t imagine life without her. She was my circle, if that makes sense.
I can still remember throwing a few bags in the front boot and getting behind the wheel of our car, looking around at the life I’d had, at the life I was turning away from. Driving away from familiar streets I turned on more time and got on the I-5 Northbound, bound for Someplace I’d Never Been Before.
Two days followed, tow days of thinking about how much I wanted to kill the people who’d killed my brother. Two days to come to terms with the fact that I’d already started to hate the person I was becoming.
+++++
NAS Whidbey Island became my home after Berkeley, especially after doing hard time in OCS and then Pri-Fly in Pensacola. Like my brother I went into attack aircraft, in my case the A-6E Intruder, and after my initial squadron orientation and readiness training ay Whidbey I was assigned to VA-165 and sent to Southeast Asia. I won’t dwell on this part of the circle but in my mind I avenged my brother by plastering targets all around Hanoi and Haiphong, but even if such a thing was truly possible I have to admit now that I found no pleasure or satisfaction in anything about the experience. If anything I felt more empty than I ever had, but Death is like that. Maybe I was just bitter now, probably because the whole vengeance thing proved nothing at all. Then, as the war wound down I couldn’t wait to…do what? To do what…exactly…with the burned-out husk of my life?
Stay in the Navy? I used to go up to the hangar deck then aft to the fantail and I’d stand at the rail and watch the churning water down there in the dark. My brother was down there now, a part of the sea again. What would he have wanted me to do, I wondered?
No. The Navy wasn’t going to happen. Not to me. The Navy had taken his life and was chewing mine up slowing. Each cat shot in the night, every bombing run, the night traps and the endless endless endless stress of living up to everyone’s endless endless endless expectations. About the best thing I could say about flying is I didn’t have to look into the eyes of the people I killed, but that didn’t mean all those broken circles would leave me be; no, they came calling in my nightmares, where I least expected them. Where there was no place to hide.
I’d kept in touch with some of the guys in the band and one of the guys wrote back and told me the group still wanted me. But Joyce, he wrote, my red headed green eyed girlfriend and the love of my life was long gone, married to a realtor and I realized she was well beyond my reach now, but yet somehow that loss felt like a reward I all too richly deserved.
Staring down into the churning sea behind an aircraft carrier is a strange thing, especially so at two in the morning. Your mind dances in phosphorescent chaos and there are no stars reflecting off the echoes of fleet-footed memories. You are alone with the cold truth of the sea, her eternal nothingness an all beckoning gravity singing her siren’s songs you could swear you’d heard before – maybe in another time, or another life…
There was a piano in one of the squadron ready room on the Connie, a beat up old upright tied off to a bulkhead, and I went to her on my last night aboard and played Take Me To The Pilot. I mean I really banged it out, five years of hate pouring through my fingers into the poor old thing and when I looked up there were a couple dozen pilots standing there in awe, maybe because I’d stopped playing when I left Berkeley so no one knew I played. I finally told my shipmates about the group I’d been in before all this flying shit and no one could believe it. “What the fuck are you doing out here,” they asked.
“I hate the world and I want to set it on fire,” I replied – and everyone laughed.
I mean, really, who wouldn’t? Who knows, maybe we all wanted something as insane as that – each in our way, but whatever, it was good for a laugh.
But not me; I wasn’t laughing. In fact, I’d never been more serious in my life.
+++++
After signing some papers that part of my life closed like a bad book. I found my Porsche and got her ready to roll and then threw my bags in the front boot again and after a little soul searching on a beach turned onto the I-5 once again and this time headed South, only when I got to Berkeley I looked at the offramp and shook my head then just drove right on by. It was time to go home so home I went. Back to Newport Beach. Back to standing in line at The Crab Cooker on Friday afternoons with mom and dad, back to catching up with old friends from high school. I went up to SNA, that’s Orange County Airport to the uninitiated, to one of the flight schools there and I talked about maybe teaching or something like that but one of the owners asked me why I hadn’t considered the airlines.
Because I hadn’t. No reason, really. Maybe I just didn’t want to be a bus driver, I think I said and that made everyone laugh. Everyone there wanted to be a bus driver…
So anyway, me being me that’s exactly what I did.
+++++
I ended up at TWA because I thought maybe flying internationally would be more interesting, and who knows, maybe it was. I started off in 707s, well, actually the 707-320c, and like all the new hires back in the day I drew the really glamorous routes during my first few years. In my case it was JFK to LAX – which is, believe me, about the most boring route a commercial pilot can get saddled with. Two years of boring and I was about ready for a career change. Maybe something exotic. You know, maybe something along the lines of dental hygiene or plumbing.
Then I drew JFK to Stockholm.
Lots of blonds in Stockholm, right? That had to be a good thing, right?
I was happy again and all thought of going to dental hygiene school vanished. But within a year the word was we were going to drop 707s and transition to L-1011s for most of our trans-Atlantic European routes, so it was back to school – then a year after getting my type I went back to school to work on my transition to captain. To four stripes. The promised land of commercial aviation.
And I ended flying out of Boston Logan for the rest of my career, flying the TriStar to either Heathrow or Charles De Gaulle, though occasionally to Frankfurt or Munich. It was fun work, satisfying in its way, yet all this flying stuff has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Well, almost nothing, but circles are like that. You gotta follow the breadcrumbs, ya know? You gotta go where they take you.
A lot of people think that cockpit crews work as teams, like two or three pilots working together all the time, and there was a time when this was true. The problem with such groupings is simple enough to understand, though. When people work together all the time relationships develop. Some relationships are good, some are not so good, while others may grow toxic and mean-spirited – but none of these relationships end up creating a competent cockpit environment. The end result of all this is you really never know who’ll be working with you until you show up at the airport and get your manifest and load-out from the dispatch office.
Getting to know the people you fly with is not exactly discouraged, but neither is it encouraged. Call it a gray area. Inviting some of the guys over to watch a football game is sort of okay, while screwing one of the flight attendants you fly with is kind of a no-no. Assuming male-female gender combinations in the cockpit happen more frequently these days – as opposed to when I was flying – screwing your co-pilot is about the worst thing cockpit crews can do today. Period. I have to assume that the same principle applies to male-male or female-female hookups as well, if you know what I mean…but I’d rather not go there.
Still, you get to know the people you do fly with. If, for instance, you fly with John Doe three times a month you kind of pick up where you left off, talking about his farm in Indiana or his son’s interest in wearing stockings and high heels. And you might fly from Boston to Paris with one First Officer and Flight Engineer and then have an entirely new crew for the return. Again, you just never really knew who you’d work with, but even so – over time, anyway – you began to know quite a bit about the people you were flying with.
Everything is inevitable, ya know? Like points on a curve. More breadcrumbs along the way.
+++++
Mike Elliot was one such character. He was a couple of years older than I yet he’d never expressed any interest in moving up to captain. None. He didn’t want the added responsibility, he told me once, or all the extra pressure that went along with the position. And, as it happened, Mike’s attitude wasn’t really all that unusual. I met a number of First Officers over the years who were comfortable where they were, the same with a whole bunch of Flight Engineers. Mike was usually down in the dumps about something his wife had done to him and he was, generally speaking, a very unhappy fella.
On one trip to Paris, Mike’s wife, a petite fire breathing dragon named Isabel, joined us on the flight across from Boston; they were going to spend a few weeks in France on vacation – together – and yet Mike was despondent about the whole thing.
Because, as it turned out, Isabel was a total control freak. Not a casual misanthrope but a real balls-to-the wall man-eating hell-bitch sort of control freak. She’d been a dancer of some sort, ballet, not exotic, and even I could see she was cute. Or, well, maybe once upon a time her looks had covered up certain character traits. When I met her the first time, and it was on that trip, all I noticed was an uncertain meanness in her eyes, and a tendency to mock everyone and everything around her – her husband Mike most of all. After being around her for about five minutes I realized she was a toxic compound, really mean to the core, and I couldn’t wait to make my excuses and get away from her. Which was exactly what I did, too.
Then again, I was flying back to Boston the next morning and had to hit the sack fairly early; Mike had no such luck and he was stuck with the bitch, and it didn’t take a lot of imagination to understand where all his existential despair came from. Anyway, after we cleared customs I found the crew shuttle to the hotel and left Mike and the hell-bitch to enjoy their vacation together.
We typically got into CDG, or Charles De Gaulle International, a little after six in the morning, and I usually didn’t go back out to the airport until nine the next morning, so my routine in Paris was fairly casual. Check in at the hotel then head down to a favorite bistro for a quick breakfast before a long walk to nowhere in particular followed by a late lunch and then heading off to bed, and that’s exactly what I did that December night.
Except in the middle of that night I jumped out of bed, startled by the pounding drumbeat of someone banging on my door; and there was Mike in a bath-robe, all bleary-eyed and blitzed out of his mind, crying and halfway out of his mind. I was, on the other hand, shaking from yet another nightmare, and that was before Mike’s fists started hammering on my door. Anyway, he said he couldn’t take it anymore. At least that’s what he said between ragged sobs full of pointless accusations and pointed recriminations. He couldn’t, he said, spend a dime without her approval. He couldn’t eat a thing she didn’t approve of first; at dinner that night she’d ordered his meal, told him what he was allowed to drink and even the people sitting around them had noticed her overbearing crudeness and it had gone downhill ever since.
Yet there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, and certainly nothing I was willing to say about matters. In truth, I didn’t know Mike all that well and I sure didn’t know his wife, which, if nothing else, meant I really didn’t know both side of the story. By the way, getting pulled into this kind of drama without knowing the true dynamics of the relationship is, in my experience, a toxically stupid thing to do and besides, it was two in the morning. I helped Mike get a room then trudged back up to my own and promptly passed out.
Sleep was, however, not to be. Probably less than a half hour later I sat up in bed, my ears ringing like church bells as even more furious pounding on my door woke me – again. Yes indeedy, I was a really happy camper. Only when I went to the door this time I found a vampire bat named Isabel frothing at the mouth in rabid fury on the other side of peephole.
And even as I opened the door to my room she tried to push her way in – not with much success, I might add – and then she demanded to know where her husband was. I pointed to the open doors that led to my balcony and said as politely as I could that when her husband had heard her banging on the door he had decided to jump, then I slammed the door in her face.
I listened to the stream of four-letter invectives as she made for her broomstick and yes, I smiled, not really caring what the witch was thinking but nevertheless somehow quite pleased with myself. And, if I was lucky, or so I thought, I might even get two more hours of sleep.
So…and this in no way accounts for what happened next, I went and packed my overnighter and caught the next crew shuttle back out to De Gaulle. I’d had enough of their drama and I’d had just enough sleep to get me through the day. Yet I halfway expected to read about Mike in the morning edition of the International Herald-Tribune. You know, something like ‘American Murders Vampire Wife, Throws Decapitated Body From Eiffel Tower.’ That sort of thing. But no, nothing happened. Matter of fact, I didn’t fly with Mike again for a week or so.
Something told their vacation just didn’t work out, ya know…?
+++++
So…after signing off on the manifest and load-out in the dispatch office at CDG, I made my way out to the airplane on the early side because I wanted to stop off for breakfast at Maxims. I always loved their ham and cheese omelet and made it a point to drop by for breakfast whenever I made the CDG-Logan run, and with a decent breakfast under my belt I went on out to the gate to get the day going.
And that’s when my life turned upside down.
Red hair. Batik dress. Sitting in a cloud of patchouli. Joyce. Joyce of the green eyes.
Sitting with a young girl. Sitting there expectantly – just like she was waiting, for me.
Because, as it happened, that’s exactly what she was doing.
+++++
Maybe the first clue that something was wrong came when she ran into the pilot’s arms.
She wasn’t the skinny little thing he remembered, either. As a matter of fact, he thought she was rather plump. The bags under her eyes came as a surprise, too. Still, the pilot seemed to take hold of the moment and he helped her back into her seat and gave her a tissue to wipe away the tears that had come as a surprise.
+++++
“Joyce? I can’t believe it’s you!”
“I know, I know,” she said between sniffles. “I just really need to see you, to talk to you.”
And about this time I notice the teenaged girl sitting next to Joyce. Then I noticed her eyes. Which for some reason reminded me of my own mother’s blue-green eyes.
Fuck.
What was that sound? Cosmic tumblers slipping into place?
“Joyce? What is it?” I think I managed to say – as I looked at the teenager.
“We need to talk,” she repeated, now gasping for air.
“I can see that,” I sighed, wondering where I’d packed my heartburn medications. “Are you on this flight?”
“Yes, your dad helped me.”
Okay, like that was a big help. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Can we talk – once we get to Boston?”
She nodded before she hauled a wad of soggy tissue up to her nose and began playing something that sounded an awful lot like The Ride of the Valkyries.
Not exactly knowing what else to do I looked at the teenager and held out my hand. “Hi. My name’s Jim. And you are?”
“Tracy,” the girl said – and rather sullenly, too – as she took my hand in her’s.
Then Joyce looked at me and shrugged – as if the gravity taking hold of us had grown too strong to ignore. “Jim…she’s your daughter.”
I think there’s something about those cosmic tumblers – like they make an unmistakable, almost imperceptible little clicking noise as they slip into place. You can feel them, too, right in the middle of your heart.
+++++
They were flying coach but I took care of that and moved them up to the front of the plane before I disappeared into the cockpit. I was so early I had the space all to myself – until one of the flight attendants, a sweet thing I’d known for years came in to go over the cabin manifest.
“Anything I need to know about?” she asked.
Really. No kidding. Like what would you say then, ya know? “Well,” I began, “it turns out a girl I was nailing back in college has a kid, and guess what? I’m the daddy. And…I just found out.”
“Uh, okay.”
“And they’re on this flight. I just put them in 2A & B. Would you take care of them for me, please.”
“Take care of them? What did you have in mind?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have a clue, Jill. As a matter of fact I’m feeling a little speechless right now.”
“You? Speechless? Wow, I am impressed.”
“Jill? Not now, please.”
“Okay, champagne and caviar it is. Anything else I need to know?”
I think I just shook my head, but not much else remains in my mind about the rest of that day. Once we got in to Logan and parked on the ramp at T5, I helped Joyce and Tracy off the plane and through customs, then Joyce told me to pick a place where we could talk for a while.
“Where are you staying?” I asked her in reply.
“Nowhere right now.”
“Nowhere? What does that mean?”
“I was in Copenhagen,” she said, “but I needed a way home so I called your dad.”
“Uh, Joyce, you’re losing me. Do you guys have a place to stay or not?”
“No.”
“I don’t mean to split hairs, but are you telling me you don’t have anyplace to live?”
“Mom!” Tracy cried-out in exasperation. “Just tell him!”
“Tracy, just back off, okay?” Joyce whispered, her voice a coarse, jagged thing that seemed to have come from someplace way beyond tired. “Jim? Just get us out of here, please.”
Tired, yes, but I heard a rising tide of panic in her voice and now all of a sudden I realized I was looking at some kind of breakdown in the making. And, if I was reading the tea leaves just right my father had given his blessing to this meeting so I really needed to get my act together, and quick. I picked up Joyce’s bag and headed for the crew shuttle – with these two strangers in tow. We got to my car, an ancient Land Rover that I used to drive to the airport in winter, and I did the only thing that came to mind…I drove them up to my place.
I’d bought a little place in Manchester-by-the-Sea after I settled on Logan as my home base; it was new construction and bigger than I needed but it was almost right in the center of town and I could walk to almost everything I needed. I’d furnished the place as if a family might – had one lived there, though I knew not why at the time; maybe because it felt like the right thing to do? So, are you thinking breadcrumbs and circles yet?
And as I think I mentioned, it was early December and the mid-afternoon sky was lead gray, but the sky around Boston in wintertime is always lead gray – and cold. There’d been a couple of snowy days a few weeks prior but only the gritty remains were left on the margins of the highway leading out from Boston; it was, I guess, a typical New England winter’s day – which is to say it was depressing as hell. When I pulled into my driveway and hit the garage door opener the first words out of Joyce’s mouth concerned our little green Porsche.
“You still have it?” she cried, and for some reason seeing the old thing made her cry – again.
I got their bags to the rooms I thought they’d like, then went downstairs to wait for them, and Tracy came down first, and she found me in the kitchen popping the top on a Coke.
“Is there anything to drink?” she asked.
“All kinds of stuff in the ‘fridge. Help yourself.”
She found my last Coke and stood behind the sink and slugged it down, then she took a deep breath before cutting loose with a timber-rattling belch.
Nice first impression, ya know?
“So. You’re my dad.” Not a question, just a statement of fact. And she didn’t seem too excited by the idea, either.
“Uh, look, this is all news to me, Tracy. Have you and your mother talked much about all this?”
“Oh…only for the past ten years or so.”
“How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Fourteen. I’ll be fifteen on the twenty-fifth.”
“A Christmas baby,” I said, doing themath as I watched her. And yes, the numbers worked out perfectly. I could in fact remember the night I’d nailed Joyce that would have led to a December birth. I was, in fact, in Pensacola, Florida at the time she came into the world, and by then Joyce was supposedly hooked up with some realtor or something like that. “That always sounded like…” I started to say…
“Like getting short-changed? Christmas and your birthday on the same day so you only get half as many presents…?” She shrugged, then she walked off – into the living room, and there she plopped down onto the sofa and finished off a root beer. And then Joyce came down the stairs and straight away asked for a mineral water, just as Tracy fired off another wall rattling burp.
“Sparkling?” I asked, trying to ignore the eruption in the living room.
“If you have it. Please.”
“What about dinner?” I asked. “We’ve got a couple of good seafood places within walking distance, if anyone’s interested.”
“I’ve always wanted to try lobster,” Tracy chirped brightly. “Is there anyplace for that?”
“Sure,” I replied. “Joyce? What about you? Are you hungry yet?”
“Give me a half hour,” she sighed, trying to smile a little.
I handed her a Perrier after she sat beside Tracy, and it wasn’t hard to see my contribution to her features as they sat side by side. And it wasn’t too big a stretch to see my mother – as well as bits of me and my brother – in her profile.
And yes, this was all a little unsettling – yet I was still waiting to hear what this was really all about.
“So?” I began cheerfully. “I think you said there’s something you wanted to tell me?”
Joyce sipped her water, then put the little green bottle down on the table in front of her legs.
“Yeah, Jim. I’m sorry, I should’ve let you know about Tracy years ago but after I got married…”
“Did your husband know?” I asked…
…and she shook her head. “We hooked up right after you left, but I knew. And I never told him. Then during some kind of medical exam he learned he was sterile and that was the end of that. He filed for divorce about three years ago. I tried to keep up with the house payments but, well, that didn’t work out. That’s when I contacted your dad. He’s been helping us out a little…”
I think my hands were shaking by that point. I know I was upset, but just then I saw that Tracy was curling up inside, already extremely afraid something bad was about to happen, so I tried to let go, let Joyce get this out in her own way.
“…but we ended up losing the house. We tried staying with my mom for a while but that didn’t work out, either.”
“I can only imagine,” I sighed. I remembered Joyce’s mother. She’d been an alcoholic for as long as I’d known Joyce and I couldn’t imagine a worse place to raise a kid.
“You remember her?”
“She’s kind of hard to forget, Joyce.”
“Yeah, well, she’s worse now.”
“So…where were you living, when you were married?”
“Up on the coast,” she said – a little too evasively.
“I see,” I said, because I did see. ‘Up on the coast’ meant Humboldt County, the pot growing capitol of the known universe, which meant her realtor hubby had probably been knee deep in the trade. And she probably had been, too. And she was being evasive because, despite my time in Berkeley, I had always been considered uncool when and where pot was concerned. Then again, I was probably considered uncool where booze was concerned, or any other drugs, for that matter. Call me a prude or call me an asshole – it doesn’t matter to me what your excuses are – because I am the anti-drug. Always have been, always will be, and you’d be surprised how many pilots are exactly like me. Or…maybe you wouldn’t be…
“I always hated that judgmental tone,” Joyce sighed. “I can still hear the derision in your voice when you say ‘I see.’ We all could, ya know…?”
“I wasn’t cut out for that life, Joyce.”
“But you were such a good musician. I really never understood where all your anger came from?”
“I don’t either, but here’s the kicker. I really don’t care where it came from, and guess what? I’m not going to change anytime soon. I hope that’s not going to be a problem for you.”
And Tracy was getting smaller and smaller, turning in on herself the more I spoke, the more worked up I got, but it didn’t take a real rocket scientist to figure out that all the horror stories she’d heard about me were coming true. More than true. She was getting a front row seat to her nightmare-come-true…her asshole father in all his self-righteous glory about to explode and throw them back out on the street. Again.
But then…the circle started to close.
“Jim, I’m sick,” Joyce said. The green eyed love of my life. The girl I turned away from when I decided to destroy the world…
“Sick?” I said.
“It’s called a glioblastoma. It’s a…”
“I know what a glioblastoma is, Joyce. How long have you known?”
“About a month.”
“What’s the treatment plan?”
“Jim, I don’t have insurance. That’s why we were in Copenhagen.”
“What? Not even Medicaid?”
She shook her head and my eyes started blinking like a semaphore flashing out an SOS. I looked at my watch and went to the telephone and called a friend – who also just happened to be a lawyer. After a brief hold I explained the situation to him, right down to the Tracy thing, and he recommended we meet up for dinner and go over some options.
Joyce and Tracy were staring at me during this exchange, looking at me like I was some kind of lunatic-idiot-savior, and after I rang off I turned to them and was really quite taken aback by the sight of the two of them. Diaphanous little Joyce, well, not so petite anymore but still cute as hell, and our little girl. Two peas from the same pod. And just then it hit me. And hard.
They were the life I’d had within my grasp, and yet they were the life I never knew was within my grasp. I was angry as hell and totally unprepared for the sudden overwhelming love I felt for them both.
+++++
Marco Petrocelli was one of those all purpose lawyers everyone runs across sooner or later. He’d handled the closing on my house and beat a speeding ticket in municipal court for me. Well, more than one, actually. He played golf and liked to sail, which was how we became friends. Sailing. Not golf. A real fringe benefit of being Marco’s friend was his mom’s lasagna. His parents owned a fantastic little Italian cafe down on the waterfront and his mom’s lasagna was the stuff legends are made of.
So we met Marco at the cafe and sat in a quiet little corner booth, and Joyce finally felt free enough to let it all hang out. Tracy did too, and I assume because she probably thought I couldn’t possibly hurt either of them in front of witnesses!
Sheesh. Teenagers.
Anyway, I’ll spare you the details, but as time was of the essence Marco thought the best way to get insurance for Joyce – and Tracy – was to marry her and get her on my group policy as soon as humanly fucking possible, because Massachusetts had the best laws in the country as far as pre-existing coverage issues were concerned. He volunteered to make it happen, too.
So, here’s the scoop.
The day before I was this happy-go-lucky single guy with a nice job and no responsibilities.
Tomorrow I was going to be married to my college sweetheart. I was going to be the father of a fifteen year old girl who was, quite literally, terrified of me. And, assuming the clouds of patchouli that seemed to ooze from their pores meant they were both potheads, I was going to be up to my neck in one hell of an ethical dilemma.
Make them quit? Yup. That wasn’t an issue, at least not as far as I was concerned, yet…now I had to consider the probable results of coming down hard while having a rebellious teenager on my hands. Stupid I am not. Uncompromising? Yeah, probably, but not stupid.
I knew exactly what I needed. In fact, it was the only possible solution.
I needed a mother.
No. Let me be clear. I needed my mother.
When I called home I realized I needn’t have worried. Their bags were already packed.
+++++
Yes. I know. Maybe I could have handled this on my own. Hell, who knows, maybe I should have…but that’s not how these circle things work.
But here’s the thing. My parents were good at the whole mom and dad thing, and maybe because the first thing they ever taught me to do was to listen. Listen to them. Listen to my teachers. Listen to my friends. So…I listened. And I because I knew how to listen I found it easy to learn. And I found that by listening to people I found it easy to learn all about them, and that as a result I hardly ever got into arguments or disagreements with anyone.
Maybe it was too late to get Tracy over that hump, or maybe no one had ever tried to get her to listen, but all that fear coiled like a spring in her gut sure looked to me just like someone who didn’t know how to listen. She’s heard a lot of stuff about me but when it came right down to it, when she finally met me she had no clue how to listen to me. What she’d heard about me in the past kept her from hearing me when I spoke – and it was going to hurt us. She and me. And my mom was the best remedy to the problem I had, so why not at least give it a try…?
Why not, indeed?
Because as it happened they’d been on the sidelines for a few years. My dad had been involved for at least the last three years, and though he’d never told me about Tracy he’d done so only because Joyce had insisted he not do so. Now it looked like they were going to get to play the whole grandparent thing – and that by marrying Joyce I was going to make the game legit. How perfect! Instant family!
But wait a minute there, young whippersnapper. Your betrothed, your wife, has a glioblastoma, and in case no one has clued you in yet, this wife of yours, the one with the glioblastoma, is going to die. And probably within a year, if not a whole lot sooner.
In other words, this part of the story does not come with a happy ending.
+++++
I think it was a few days before Christmas.
Yeah. Mike and I were scheduled to do the CDG thing again.
And I know right about now you’re scratching your head and wondering where this is going. I got that. Yeah. But, well, you see…the whole Mike thing is wrapped up in this story in all kind of interesting ways. Like I said…circles are like that.
So, yeah, dispatch office, pick up manifest and load out and Mike’s there too, going over the METARs – the meteorological reports for the North Atlantic overnight – then we walked out to the gate and stowed our flight bags, woke up the aircraft then went down onto the slush covered ramp to do our walk-around. Yeah. Cold as shit and snowing like a son of a bitch. That about sums it up. Nasty outside, and getting nastier by the minute.
Back to the ‘pit and get the heat cranked up, program the INS and sign-off for the load-out, call the stews and tell them it’s time to close and arm the doors. Call Ground for a pushback and activate the flight-plan. Push back and start three then taxi to the active. Take off and climb out of the muck and work the SID to the airway. Routine. Pilots like routine. Routine is good.
The time from pushback to takeoff to getting established on your airway is no nonsense time. There’s no extraneous chit-chat allowed. No ‘how’s the new pup doing?’ or ‘how’d that wisdom tooth thing go?’ during that phase of flight. You ‘aviate’ – period. You fly the plane and listen to ATC when they call out traffic. You fly the plane and look for traffic. Maybe a half hour later, when you hit cruise and the autopilot takes over, you start the whole idle chit-chat thing – assuming you want to.
As far as Mike was concerned I was pretty sure I didn’t want to.
Mike, on the other hand, wanted to. Hell, he needed to.
“I left Isabel,” he said like right out of the blue.
“Oh?” I think I said, not really wanting to go there.
“Yeah. The thing is, I got a problem.”
I turned and looked at the flight engineer, a crusty old dude who looked and acted like a civil war veteran, and he knowingly pulled the breaker on the CVR, the cockpit voice recorder. And voila, with Big Brother turned off you can vent to your heart’s content knowing the goons back on the ground won’t be listening as you talk about corn-holing your mother-in-law at Thanksgiving. Or…whatever…
“Oh?” I replied. “What’s up?”
“Well, see, the thing is…I’ve been seeing a dominatrix up in Beverly…”
I think I closed my eyes and looked heavenward, saying the only prayer that comes to mind in such situations: “Oh, God no…Why me?”
Then I looked at Mike. “No kidding? A dominatrix? What’s that like?” This, of course, I said in a remarkably non-judgmental voice. As in, “Oh, you like bananas on your Cheerios? Me too. Well, how about that! What a coincidence!”
“Yeah,” Mike continued, “I’m moving in with her next week.”
“Really? Doesn’t that seem kind of sudden to you?”
“No, no, not at all. She’s getting out of the scene, not going to be doing it professionally anymore…”
“She’s a…professional?” I think I asked.
“Yeah man.”
“Is that how you met?”
He nodded maniacally. “She’s great. I can’t wait for you guys to meet her.”
I turned and looked at the crusty old civil war veteran flight engineer – who was literally laughing so hard he was crying, only he had his fist in his mouth so he could laugh silently, and I don’t know why but I envied the old guy right about then.
“Yeah, you know, a few weeks ago she did me with a strap on and…”
And that was it. Crusty old dude burst out laughing so hard he started cutting cheese right there in the cockpit. In case no one ever cued you in on this, you can’t just roll down the windows on an airplane, not even up front, and cockpits are already nasty, confined spaces that smell of coffee, sweat, and spilled chicken-a-la-king – so adding old man fart to the mix just ain’t cool. And anyway, now I was laughing my ass off as I tried not to picture Mike on all fours with some leather-clad whack-job set to give him a colonoscopy on a No-Tell Motel bed. And it weren’t working. Not at all.
Then the head flight attendant called and wanted to know what was going on up here and that people in First could hear us laughing.
That put an end to the party and I told Mike we’d have to finish this conversation once we were on the ground.
C’est la vie, right?
So after we got to Gay Paree Mike told us all about this chick. All the whips and chains shit you’d ever want to hear, and then some. It was kind of funny, but then again it wasn’t.Having my ass paddled is not my idea of fun. Paying someone to paddle my ass seems like the height of insanity, yet Mike was full of so much love for this girl even I could see it.
Still, I had no clue, not really. I didn’t know the guy, not well, anyway, so about all I could do was laugh it off. Which is exactly what I did.
+++++
The next time I flew with Mike he had indeed filed for divorce and he had moved in with the dominatrix. I also learned that, surprise, Mike and Isabel had a…wait for it…a fifteen year old daughter, and now that kid was mixed up in this affair, too. I was, in a word, speechless. Did she realize what her father was into? Really…speechless.
Mike’s situation smacked – to my puritanical way of looking at the world, anyway – of a full blown middle aged crazy outburst of somewhat more or less epic proportions. Mike was in his forties and had a fifteen year old daughter and he’d been married to an absolute hell-bitch control freak and so what does he do? He hooks up with a professional dominatrix, and excuse the fuck out of me but isn’t a professional dominatrix a professional control freak? A paid mercenary control freak?
Man, I was confused.
Yet, well, my own life on the home front was already confusing enough.
Joyce was indeed sick, sicker than even I imagined in my most pessimistic imaginings. She’d be lucky to see June, at least that was the word her oncologists laid on me. My parents were doing their best to keep Tracy from falling apart – because, let’s face it, I was away on average four days a week, sometimes five or six, and Joyce wasn’t strong enough to handle treatments and raising a daughter.
Oh yes. Treatments. Surgery. Chemo. Radiation. All with the hope of giving Joyce an additional six months to a year. Tough call. After seeing what she went through I’m not sure I could do it, not sure I’d make the same decision, but when the sand is running through your hourglass at that speed time becomes a seriously interesting issue. As in: what would you do if you were almost forty and someone told you that six months was it. The party is going to be over and the lights are going out. Wouldn’t an extra six months to a year seem like the most important thing in the universe right about then?
And here’s one more piece of this little ever-expanding puzzle.
I’d begun falling in love with Joyce all over again. Whatever had brought us together back at Berkeley was still there. It was a palpable thing. My mom saw it first, then Tracy did. I felt it, or at least the beginnings of that resurgence, when I saw her sitting next to the window by the gate at CDG. Maybe because I’d only been with a few women since leaving the Navy, and nothing really serious had ever come along. Sorry, Jill, but I tried to be upfront, ya know?
And, oh yeah, I can talk all about her now so let’s get it out in the open right now. Let’s talk about that which we’ve ignored so far. Destiny. As in: Joyce was my destiny, right? And some mysterious force brought us back together, right? La forza del destino, nes pa? I’m still not sure I buy into all that stuff but there it is, hanging out there in the air apparent, just waiting for your casual refutation. Or mine, for that matter.
The thing is…I can’t.
I held her in the shower before her surgery, and that was the night she asked me to shave her head. I always loved her hair so the idea of cutting that away from her really hurt us both. But there it was, reality. And sure, yeah, reality is a close cousin to destiny. I get that. And at times reality is inescapable, a weight on your chest you can’t shove aside, so with scissors in hand I cut her hair and placed the strands in a big zip-lock baggie to we could drop them off at a place that made wigs for chemo patients to use later on in their treatment. Later on, when those lucky souls were well on their way to a remarkable recovery. Only Joyce wasn’t on that road, and that was about all I could fathom as I put a fresh blade in my razor and began lathering her skin, then shaving her smooth.
After I finished I just held her. No words came. No words could possibly suffice. Standing there under the hot water all I knew is I wanted to hold on to her for something like forever. I hated myself for ever leaving her. I loved her for finding me again, for trusting in me enough to pass her future on to me.
I thought about destiny a lot those days. Mine and, oddly enough, Mike’s.
I know. Circles are funny. Yada-yada-yada…
+++++
Because about a month later I learned that Mike had, quite literally, bought the farm. Well, he and the (ex-)professional dominatrix – and I wish I was making this up – along with her ten year old daughter (!) moved into an ancient farm house in the hills not all that far from my place. Isabel, his now ex-wife, and their fifteen year old daughter moved into an apartment in Boston and that was, I reckoned, that.
Oh, yeah. That. What a word.
But there’s that whole destiny thing lurking around out there, ya know…? That old saw about not counting your chickens before they’ve hatched? Yeah. As in: don’t fuck around with destiny, because she’ll kick your ass every time.
+++++
I guess it was April. Joyce was not doing well and Tracy was acting out at home and in school – and even my parents were struggling to keep up with Tracy’s constantly shifting moods. Joyce helped when she could, which was more than I managed on my two days a week at home, but Tracy was foundering and we all knew it.
Then late one night the phone rang and of course I picked it up…
…and I heard screaming in the background and a girl trying frantically to talk to me…
“Hello!” I said.
“Hi, it’s Angela. Is this Jim?”
“I’m Jim,” I said between the gales of screaming insanity I heard in the background.
“I’m Mike’s daughter, he told me to call you.”
“Oh?” Why is it that whenever destiny calls your first reaction is to say something clever like ‘Oh?’
“He’s in London and he said I should call you when I need help!”
“What’s wrong, Angela?” I think I said, molten steam seeping from my ears.
“Something’s going on with my mom. She’s not acting right…”
“Is that her screaming?” I asked.
“Yes, she’s acting really weird…” and then she stopped talking – and I’d assume she did so when the sound a smashing glass cut off her train of thought.
“What’s your address?” I asked, pen in hand.
When I hung up my dad was standing there looking at me with that “What Now?” look in his eyes.
So I told him and off we went, the Lone Ranger and Tonto off to save another damsel in distress one more time and I think the entire time I was driving into Boston Little Miss Destiny was laughing her fucking ass off.
+++++
The apartment was in tatters. So was Angela. As in bruised and battered.
Isabel was a whirling dervish and somewhere completely off this planet. One look around and dad grabbed Angela and took her down to the Land Rover; I talked Isabel down from wherever the hell she was and got her to Mass General.
One of the ER interns, probably fresh from a psych rotation, wanted to put her in a straight jacket and into a rubber room – but calmer heads prevailed. Angela helped provide a decent history, some of which I could verify, and it turned out that Isabel had started acting weird about six months ago. So as fast as you can say magnetic resonance imaging Isabel was off for some pictures of her brain and just wouldn’t you know it…?
“That’s a glioblastoma…” the attending neurologist said – about two hours later. “They’re really quite rare.”
“Oh, really?” I sighed as my gut pulled another barrel roll. “Imagine that…” Actually that was about all I could manage at the time. Maybe because I was too busy getting Destiny’s foot out of my ass.
+++++
This whole Circle of Life thing sometimes leaves me a little flummoxed.
You’re born, you live, then you die. I get that. Your life is just one small part of a larger circle, like an arc…or a segment, if you will. If you don’t have kids the circle ends with you. If you have a bunch of kids then a whole bunch of new circles spin-off of the original, yet somehow all these new circles are a part of the original, like fused atomic nuclei. Like planets orbiting their home star over eons of time.
Only Isabel and Joyce were fusing now. United by cancer, united in fighting the good fight.
And Tracy? Wild, unmanageable Tracy?
She became Angela’s new best friend, her coach and savior. It all came together naturally enough after that night. Those two teenaged girls decided they’d get through this whole cancer thing together, and just like that – problem solved. Cosmic tumblers?
Don’t get me started.
When Mike got back he surveyed the carnage he’d let slip under the door and I think he took stock of his life and found himself wonting. So…Mike being Mike and all – he moved Isabel and Angela into the farmhouse with the (ex-)professional dominatrix and her ten year old daughter. But as mentioned Isabel and Joyce were now on the same trajectory and Mike, overwhelmed – or overrun– with feelings of guilt could hardly keep up with his own feelings. So we – Mike and I – took turns taking the girls to the oncology clinic for their chemo, then their radiation, and Mike and I – now picking our way carefully through the same jagged, heart-stopping terrain – grew closer and closer as death itself came closer and closer to our respective circles.
And that’s when Destiny decided to come in for one more kick, this one aimed squarely at the heart of the matter.
+++++
The (ex-)professional dominatrix – Sybel was, I believe, her nom de guerre – called me at the house one morning, but Dad took the call.
“Jim,” he called out a minute later, “I think you’d better take this one.”
Mike was flying that day and Sybel woke up with a bad pain in her pelvic area and would I mind taking her to her doctor in the city? And, oh yes, her daughter Sadie would need someone to look after her.
“Mom?” I called out in desperation.
I mean, really, wouldn’t you?
So…I picked up the (ex-)professional dominatrix and drove her to her clinic in the city and she asked that I stay with her in the room when her doc did an ultrasound. Then her doc asked that I wait outside while they did a quick colposcopy to get a tissue sample. An emergency procedure was scheduled for five the next morning, and I learned then that Sybel had a high-grade small-cell neuroendocrine cancer. Stage 4, by the way, we soon found out. The surgeon told me that this was a very rare cancer and I’m sure by now you know exactly what I said next.
“Oh really? You don’t say?”
When I picked up Mike at Logan later that afternoon I got to explain the known and unknown intricacies of high-grade small-cell neuroendocrine cancer to him – while he broke down and apart and crumbled into a million shards of thin glass – as I drove him through the city to Mass Gen and to the crumbling remains of his passion play. Little was known about this cancer at the time, I think her doctor mentioned to him in passing, only that it was invariably fatal. No, he didn’t say that. Doctors really are not that obtuse. Anyway, Sybel soon started on some sort of generic chemotherapy but again, little was known at the time about this type of cancer and it was just a shot in the dark. She starting sinking fast by early summer, and so too did Mike.
For the life of me I can’t really remember why I bought that little house on Saw Mill Circle. I was single at the time and if you’d asked if I planned on getting married I’d have shrugged off the question as the deranged musings of a lunatic. Maybe, I told myself, five bedrooms and four baths was great for resale value. The house had three main floors, too, with a big master on the ground level, four on the next, while the third floor was finished out as a great room, but which, thankfully, as it turned out included a full bath.
The third floor turned into the hospice floor by that summer as one by one our gathered arcs drew to a close. Marco busily went over contingencies, with Sadie’s real father the first real unknown we had to confront. Also, as it happened, Mike’s divorce wouldn’t be finalized while Isabel was still alive so Angela would remain with him regardless. Yet by early summer Sadie and the other two girls were doing well together – and this is where all that talk about circles and atoms and planets comes into play.
Who knows what pulls us together, what tugs at our orbits or what comes along and tears us loose, pulls us into new orbits, new ways of being, new lives out of the old. My father could see all this at the time but maybe that was because his own arc was closing. We didn’t know it at the time, of course, and even though death didn’t come to him for a few years, he still knew. He was always wise about those kinds of things, and maybe that’s why Joyce reached out to him in the first place. Of all the people in the universe, she reached out for his warm, steady hand and he pulled her back into our orbit, kept her stable until she could find her way back to me, to her real place in the world.
Mike? Who the hell knows. I sure don’t know how to reconcile what went down with him. Sometimes middle-aged crazy sounds about right, but not others. Still, if he’d never left Isabel and if he’d never found his new orbit around Sybel’s little star we’d have never had Sadie join our own circle. So…see what I mean? This whole circle of life thing is pretty daunting and none of it makes the slightest sense – until it happens.
+++++
Joyce was a wisp of herself the last time we drifted into the shower – together. Standing there as one under the water it finally hit me: I couldn’t let her go. No way. She was confused all the time by then, and some days she hardly knew where she was, or even who I was for that matter. Still, there’s something about warm water, something almost amniotic, womblike and comfortable. I loved to hold her there, smell her hair, even as short as it was. Her skin on mine, an attraction stronger than gravity, the pull of what was meant to be. How could I let go? How could I ever? Even when I did so many years ago.
Some mistakes you can never make right, no matter how nice the water feels.
Tracy couldn’t do it. She’d come up to the third floor and the smell would hit her and she’d start to cry as he turned and fled to her room. The last few times days it was sheer will that pulled her up there to her mother’s side. Her fear was palpable. So was mine.
Joyce stayed those last days in a blue recliner with an IV hooked up to a port in her chest, and she was receiving fluids and nourishment through that line. The hospice nurse came by one day and dropped off some morphine and instructions on how to do it – and when, but there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I could pull that trigger. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Tracy or even Mike to do it, so when the time came, when Joyce was slipping into that place you might charitably call agony, we called the hospice agency and waited – no longer knowing how or what to feel. I sat with Joyce as she passed, but Tracy couldn’t do it. My mom stayed with her. My father stayed with me. We held her hands and it was all so easy. So gentle. So final.
As human beings we really have no words to say goodbye in moments like these. You do the best you can knowing words will never be enough.
But Joyce had figured that one out a long time before she grew ill. The song I wrote for her, the music we made together? All of it now on a scratchy old vinyl record hastily transcribed to binary bits on a shiny silver disc, and she asked that I slipped headphones on her head when the time came and so I played that music, our music, while she slipped away. It was music we’d made together so many years ago – yet I could see those moments unfold in her eyes as the crystalline notes made their way to the place where memories hang on the longest, and I could feel all the stories of our life come together again, all right there on one last sigh.
+++++
I’d gotten used to sleeping with her, to sleeping with someone in my bed, and the loneliness I felt after she left us was unbearable. The cold sheets, the utter quiet of night without her breathing next to me. Tracy, of course, felt pretty much the same way and so she decided she just had to have a dog.
So…why not get two dogs? One for her bed – and one for mine?
Only someone should have talked us into something more practical than Bernese Mountain Dogs. I mean, really…
Anything other than Bernese Mountain Dogs. Bernese Mountain Dogs know how to do one thing really well: they know how to drool. Drool by the bucket load. They eat a lot, too – which means they shit small Volkswagens all over your yard. They are, however, terrific cuddlers…and frankly that was all that mattered.
Because Death still had a grip on our little house.
Sybel and Isabel went next, and they passed on the same day. Don’t ask me the how or the why of such things because I do not know. Never have and never will.
Mike went up to the farm the day after his love died and cleared-out all his belongings and put the property on the market. Then he didn’t even ask, he just moved in with the rest of us. I called the guy who built the house and we converted the third floor into an apartment for him. And that, as they say, was that.
Marco had a little sailboat and we carried all our ashes out into Mass Bay. A few minutes after the deed was done a whale and her calf scooted by so close we could her them breathing and there it was again, that whole circle of life thing. It was everywhere that day. In the air, in the sea, in the eye of a passing whale. Like there was more to live than mere survival. I could feel the love in that whale’s eye, the love for her calf, her love of life. Who knows, maybe she felt what was in our beating hearts, and maybe I was looking into the beating heart of that truth when I stood looking down into an aircraft carrier’s churning wake.
Mike dated once or twice but nothing ever came of it. I think he was afraid any woman he touched would turn to cancer and that her ashes would blow away on the next sea breeze. He kept flying for a while, at least until Sadie graduated from high school, then he retired and started teaching kids to fly. By that time Sadie and Mario Petrocelli were a permanent fixture down on the waterfront, and once she started working at the restaurant as a waitress that was it. Within a few years she alone possessed the secret to Mama Petrocelli’s lasagna and there she would remain, spinning off to form new circles of her own.
Angela went to NYU and then to med school. She’s an oncologist now, and lives up in Portland, Maine, yet the funniest thing about us, the really odd part of our story, is that I love Angela and Sadie as much as I love Tracy. We came together inside a shifting moment in time, a moment when old circles completed their arcs and new circles seemed ready to start, but we, all of us, we fused under the pressure of the moment. We came together, just like families have come together throughout all our time on this planet.
I watched my father’s circle close, then my mother’s. And I watched their circles close with three girls and a slightly insane pilot there by my side because, hey, that’s what families do. When we’re together now everything feel whole and good and right with our world, and I don’t know how else to describe things. We just are.
Tracy thought she wanted to be a pilot for a while, until she heard me play the piano anyway, and then, after she really listened to the two records I was a part of she decided she wanted to be a musician. And despite all my best efforts to change her mind she turned out to be a decent keyboardist, even if she still burps too loudly.
All these spinning circles come together at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and everyone comes and spends a month or so here when the leaves are green and the breezes are soft and warm. Even Mike comes by every now and then, usually to pick up a grandkid and bounce him on a knee, but sometimes just to pick up his mail. It’s home, after all is said and done.
I married Jill, the flight attendant I’d futzed around with before Joyce came back to me. It took me a while to get there but we weren’t meant to live alone. We go down to Petrocelli’s at least once a week and eat Sadie’s lasagna, and on Sundays Marco joins us for brunch.
Jill and I like to walk out to a nearby beach – it’s called Singing Beach for some reason – and even in winter we like to walk through the snow and watch the sun come up over the water. Sunrise and sunset, points on an arc describing and defining circles of her own design, yet even so a part of who and what we are, what it means to be alive, even if we are but little tangents to her steady arc. Jill and I walk down to the sand and the sea with an old Bernese Mountain Dog by our side, and she barks at passing whales.
A modest chapter here, long enough for a cup of chamomile tea. Lots of snow on the ground around the house, and the air is quite cold, too. It is, I think I’m trying to say, perfect weather to curl up with a pup and read. Or listen to some quiet music – as the snow falls…
Part II: The Broken Road
Chapter 9
Beverly Hills, California 1 July 1976
Anders picked up the telephone and dialed Tilly’s number. He did not need to look up the number; it was by now as often dialed as any number he called, but there was otherwise nothing at all ordinary about this particular call. Or, for that matter, this particular day.
When Ted picked up the phone Anders felt a little wave of relief. “Ted?” he asked. “Got a minute?”
“Sure Dad, what’s up?”
“I wanted to know if you could come up this weekend.”
Ted knew his father’s voice – and his moods – well enough by now to know that something was wrong. “Uh, well, Kat and I were going down to the marina this weekend. They’re having a big fireworks display down there…”
“Okay. That’s fine. What about coming up early tomorrow evening and I’ll get you back out to SFO on Saturday morning?”
“It’s important, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Is Saul going to be around?”
“Yes, this concerns him – as well as you…and the Callahans.”
“Okay, Dad. My last class gets out at noon-thirty, so I can probably make the one-thirty on PSA.”
“Sounds good. I’ll pick you up at the usual place.”
“Okay, Dad, see you there.” Ted clicked the receiver and then dialed his mom’s office, and her secretary picked-up. “Hey Margie, Ted. Is Mom free?”
“Yup, I’ll put you through.”
Tilly had just wrapped up her last patient for the day but getting a call from Ted was a little out of the ordinary on a weeknight, so she was instantly on guard. “Ted? Is something wrong?”
“Not sure, Mom. Dad just called. He wants me to come up tomorrow afternoon…”
“What about Saturday with Katharine and her father?”
“Coming back Saturday morning?”
“Just one night? That is strange. You want me to give him a call?”
“No, I can handle it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. He said Saul was going to be there, the Callahan’s too.”
“The Callahans? Really?”
“That’s what he said.”
“What flight are you taking?”
“I’m shooting for the one-thirty.”
“Okay. I’m coming too.”
Ted sighed and shook his head. “You sure you wanna do this, Mom? He might get all wound-up again, ya know?”
“I know,” Tilly said. In fact, because of all the scheduled bicentennial celebrations she was halfway expecting Anders to be in rare form. “Are you and Kat going out tonight?”
“No, she’s got an MCAT study session Saturday morning.”
“I thought you had something going on with Sam?”
“No, that’s next weekend.”
“Well, looks like you’re stuck with me for dinner, Kid. Anything sound good to you?”
“You’d think that maybe I know you by now, right? Maybe just a little?”
“Maybe so, Mom. You never can tell, though…right?”
She sighed – then scowled. “You know we loved each other, right? Things just got out of control.”
“Yeah, Mom, I know.” But, he sighed to himself, control was always the operant word, wasn’t it?
+++++
Almost everyone met up at the Little Dutch House before heading down to the wharf, where they picked up Harry before walking down to Scoma’s for brunch. No one seemed talkative, and even Harry seemed caught off guard – or was he simply annoyed – by all the unasked for importance attached to this impromptu gathering. Imogen, for her part, seemed more than a little nervous, and for some reason that made Tilly put up a few more walls of protection.
Anders ordered two bottles of riesling to go with a couple of platters of chilled seafood, and after their waitress left them he cleared his throat and looked at everyone seated around the table. “I am sorry for all the drama, but I have some news.”
“Dad?” Ted said, and though still not sure what this was all about his father’s voice sounded more than somber. “Are you okay?”
“Me – okay? Why yes, of course, but wait – this has nothing to do with my health. In fact, if I may get to the point, I have decided to go home and I wanted to tell each of you personally.”
“Home?” Tilly said, more than a little interested now – but still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But Anders merely shook his head. “I am going to Israel,” he said. “To our home.”
“Israel?” Ted cried. “But Dad – why…there?”
“Because,” Anders said, “I have grown tired of having to look behind myself, of waiting for the ‘stab in the back’ – again.”
“Again?” Ted asked.
But it was Saul who spoke now. “The stab in the back was Herr Hitler’s favorite saying, Ted. That Jews in the Weimar Republic stabbed all Germans in the back by agreeing to surrender when – and how – they did.”
“So, Hitler blamed Jews for that, too?”
Saul smiled, a rueful, apologetic smile. “The word is scapegoat, Ted. Blame does not adequately describe what Herr Hitler was conjuring.”
“So,” Ted continued, “moving next door to ten million pissed off Arabs is supposed to be safe?”
“You misunderstand, Ted,” Anders interjected. “Israel is our homeland. God has ordained this.”
Harry cleared his throat – before he spoke next. “Anders, if you don’t mind me asking, just what are you planning on doing over there?”
“Teaching,” Anders said, though a little defensively.
Harry nodded. “Well, I for one will miss you.”
And for some reason this made Anders cry – just a little. “Thank you, Harald. You will always be welcome in our house.”
“Our house?” Tilda Sorensen said, her left eyebrow arching tremulously.
“Yes, Tilda. You see, I am getting married once I arrive,” Anders sighed as he shrugged unapologetically, perhaps even a little defiantly – though he was almost imperceptibly grinning…just a little.
“Dad!” Ted growled. “What the fuck!”
Tilly signaled their waitress and ordered a double martini, dirty.
Harry Callahan leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling, trying his best not to get up and leave the table – but only because he’d noticed his mother’s hands had begun trembling.
Yet…in the same instant Ted’s eyes were drawn to Imogen’s hands as well, and while at first he wondered why, it took just a moment for his eyes to drift to Lloyd Callahan and then back to Imogen. When his eye caught Harry’s upturned sidelong glances he realized the truth of the moment…there was something going on between Lloyd and Imogen…and in the moment he wondered how long it had been going on…?
Then he looked at Saul and watched him turn away, and Ted wondered what secrets the old man was carrying around – until he followed Saul’s eyes to another table across the dining room.
An Old Man in an odd looking cape was sitting at the table, alone, and he was staring at Imogen.
And to Ted it seemed as if the Old Man was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
+++++
Ted and Kat met Sam Gold down at the Marina del Rey, at the end of a finger-pier behind a fence that belonged, apparently, to a sprawling apartment complex located just above the slips. Sam was talking to the yacht’s captain and chef when Kat led Ted up the boarding ramp to the main deck.
Though Ted had been down to the boat twice before, the sheer size of Sam’s latest toy simply left him awestruck each time he saw it. Her name was The April Fools, and she had been built in Holland a couple of years before by a consortium of naval architects and ship builders known as Feadship; she was the largest yacht permanently berthed in the marina and was universally regarded as the most luxurious yacht on the West Coast. At 178 feet length overall and with a permanent crew of seven – that usually lived on board –The April Fools was also one of the few yachts on the West Coast that kept a Bell JetRanger permanently onboard.
LA County was putting on the fireworks display that Saturday night, on July 3rd, and the plan was for the boat to head out into the open sea just offshore and watch the fireworks before heading across the channel to Catalina Island, where the yacht would moor just off Casino Point at Avalon Harbor. There would be more fireworks on Sunday night, leaving all day Sunday free for exploring the island, and after that display wrapped the yacht would return to LA in time to get everyone off to work. Sam would, not unusually, leave by helicopter after the fireworks display on the island – but only because he was slated to take his Gulfstream II to Paris early Monday morning.
Ted walked up and shook Sam’s hand, but Sam wasn’t having any of it; he took Ted in hand and pulled him into a deep hug, then he hugged his daughter before leading them to their stateroom. Most of the guests were already on board, all of them actors on this trip, but Ted and Kat had the largest guest stateroom and that had more than a couple of the actors pissed off.
By the time the crew cast off the lines the marina was full of little sailboats puttering out the main channel, everyone vying to be close to the end of the breakwater where the fireworks display was being readied, yet everyone in the harbor stared at The April Fools as she pulled away from her pier and made for the breakwater – probably because everyone knew she would be packed with Hollywood royalty…
…which immediately caused more than a few problems…
As it seemed every little boat had to see how close they could get to the yacht, causing the skipper to lay on the collision horn more than once. Little speedboats buzzed by, bikini clad girls waving from the bows as they passed – until a half dozen LA Sheriff’s Department boats showed up and chased everyone away.
The April Fools increased speed once clear of the breakwater and went about a half mile offshore, and at that point Ted and Kat walked up to the bow and stood facing the wind, Ted holding onto the varnished teak rails as the little ship crashed into a nice deeply rolling swell – sending spray fifty feet into the air. Ted turned and looked aft to the flying bridge and waved at Sam, then he turned to Katharine and held her close.
“How was San Francisco?” she asked. “As bad as you expected?”
“Maybe. I’m not really sure. Dad’s moving to Israel, and he says he’s getting married once he gets there.”
“What? Your dad?”
“Yup.”
“Do you know to who?”
Ted shook his head. “No, but he wants us to come over at Thanksgiving for the ceremony. Mom too.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Katharine sighed, laughing a little. “I bet that was good for a laugh.”
“I didn’t see anyone laughing, Kat. Not even Harry.”
“Oh – the cop? Was he there, too?”
“Yeah. Kind of unnerving too, if you know what I mean. He’s still carrying that hand-cannon in a shoulder holster.”
“I can’t tell whether I like him or not, you know?”
Ted nodded. “Harry is an acquired taste, Kat. How many times have we been to dinner with him?”
“Twice, I think. Always at that crab shack down by the pier.”
“Ah, yes. Beer, with seafood optional.”
“He can really pack it down, you know?”
“That’s our Harry. He ain’t happy without his Oly.”
“Oly?”
“Olympia Beer. Seattle’s finest, I guess, or something like that, anyway.”
The boat’s bow crashed into another large rolling wave and another wall of water flew out from the ship in a long, graceful arc – and just then another couple came up to the bow. Ted recognized the actor but for some reason couldn’t remember his name – but he nevertheles held out his right hand as the actor approached.
“Dustin Henry,” the actor said as he took Ted’s hand in his. “And you’re Ted, right?”
“I am. Nice evening, isn’t it?”
Dustin looked around. “Yeah. I guess. Look, Sam just told me you’re going to be co-executive producer on Falling Water, but that you’ll be making a lot of the casting decisions.”
Ted just smiled – if only because this was the first he’d heard of it – but he also knew how Sam worked these things. “What can I do for you, Dustin?”
“I want the lead. You haven’t committed to Redford yet, have you?”
Ted simply shrugged. “Nothing is written in stone yet, Dustin, if that’s what you mean.”
“Goddamn!” Henry cried. “It’s like fucking ice up here! How can you stand it?”
Ted simply shrugged – though he grinned just a little.
“Look,” Dustin pleaded, “could we talk this weekend? I have some ideas I’d like to go over with you…”
Again Ted just smiled and shrugged, not really sure what Sam was up to yet. “Why don’t we just enjoy the fireworks tonight, okay?” he added, concluding the exchange. He watched Henry deflate than walk back to the main saloon, but he noticed Sam was still up on the fly bridge watching him intently – but this time Same waved at him and Ted nodded in return. He knew not to ask what Sam was up to, and that Sam would tell him when he was good and ready – but then he turned to Kat and looked at her. She kept her eyes dead ahead and he instantly surmised she was in on it – whatever ‘it’ was.
“How’d the study session go?” he asked her – watching her reaction as he changed gears.
“Good. I had no idea there’d be an essay on moral reasoning, and it’s an important part of the test, too.”
“No kidding? Moral reasoning…for physicians? Now that’s a stretch…”
“Yup, that was a real surprise,” she sighed.
“You want to tell me what’s up with your dad?”
“No, not really.”
“I kinda figured, Kat.”
“I’m getting cold.”
“Yeah, me too. Getting rough out, isn’t it…?”
She turned and smiled at him, but that was all she’d give away that night.
But when everyone gathered on the aft deck to watch the fireworks Dustin stood next to him, engaging in pleasant chit-chat through the display, and then he and his wife sat next to Ted and Kat when everyone gathered for a late supper.
“That was really something,” Dustin said in his thick Brooklyn accent. “Almost as good as New York’s.”
“Hard to compete with all the tall ships in the harbor,” Sam Gold said. “That gave me goosebumps, seeing those ships against the two towers last night, but I thought the guys did a nice job here.”
“Yeah. Nice,” Henry said, and Ted leaned back and watched the interplay between Sam and this actor. But again he got the impression Sam was watching him, sizing him up – by how well he handled the situation…then…
“I’m headed to Paris on Monday,” Sam added. “Doing some location work with the crew. Ted? You think you could take some time off from your work and join me?”
Ted didn’t act surprised, not in the least – he just leaned back in his chair and looked at Sam: “No sweat,” he sighed, though he grinned – just a little.
“You didn’t happen to bring your passport, did you?” Sam asked.
“Of course,” Ted replied.
“Dustin? You bring your passport?”
“Yessir, sure did.”
“Well, Ted and I will let you know in the morning. Kat? Think you could entertain our guests for a while? Ted and I need to have a sit-down before I hit the sack.”
“Sure, Daddy,” she cooed.
“Alright then, if you’ll excuse us? Ted?”
Ted followed Sam forward to the midship stairway and they made their way down and aft to Sam’s stateroom, then to a little sitting area on the port side.
“You really bring your passport?” was the first thing he asked.
“I did, sir. Yes.”
“Mind if I ask why?”
“I always carry it when I fly.”
“Oh, that’s right. You went up to the city yesterday. How’d that go?”
“Okay, sir. My dad has decided to move to Israel, and he’s getting married again.”
Sam looked at him, his demeanor unchanged. “You okay?”
“I’m still getting used to the idea, sir.”
Sam nodded his leonine head, then he pointed to a chair as he took a seat and picked up a phone. “Lee, bring my cigars, and two glasses of Drambuie, rocks please.”
Ted sat and waited.
“How old are you now, Ted? Twenty-one?”
“Yessir.”
“Your teachers tell me good things about the work you’re turning in. Good ideas, sound thinking. You ready to get your hands dirty on a little project?” Sam said as he took his glass of Drambuie from Lee, his personal waiter/valet who was never far from his side.
“Of course,” Ted said, taking a second glass from Lee.
“You ever thought of acting?” Sam said as he fiddled with a cigar.
“Me, sir? Acting? Not on your life…”
Sam chuckled as he shook his head. “You’ve got the looks and you handle pressure well. You might do pretty good if the mood ever strikes…”
“It won’t, sir.”
“Well, let’s clear the air a little, okay?”
“Sir?”
“Look, I know you think I helped you into film school but it was all you. Once you were accepted, well, I asked a couple friends of mine there to keep man eye on you, to keep me posted on your progress – and they’ve had nothing but good things to say about your work so far.”
Ted looked at Sam and nodded, still not sure where this was headed but more than curious now.
Sam was enjoying this, the kid’s calm demeanor impressive as hell. Most of the ass kissers he dealt with would have been on their knees by now, but not Ted. This kid had ‘it’ and the idea filled Sam with a sense of wonder. Katharine had bumped into this kid, there’d been no prearranged agendas in play, no one running a con on him. No, Ted was the real deal and he’d just fallen into his lap. The kid needed a mentor, true enough, but Sam had known even then that he’d need an heir to the throne one day. Because time was running out and he’d begun to realize he couldn’t afford to waste another day. But first he needed to put the kid under some real pressure, see if he had the balls to take the reins – if and when…
“How are you and Katharine doing?” Sam asked.
“Fine, sir.”
“She tells me you want to set a date. Is that about the size of it?”
“Yessir.”
“Ted?”
“Sir?”
“How many times do I have to tell you…my name is not sir. Got it? Not between you and me – understand?”
Ted nodded. “Okay.”
“If there’s something on your mind I need you to be comfortable enough talking with me to come to me with any problem you can’t figure out on your own. Don’t procrastinate, don’t let things fester. So no keeping things from me. Got it? No bullshit, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now, tell me what’s going on between you two?”
“I think she still wants to put off getting married until she gets out of med school…”
“And you’re still against that?”
“I am, sir – uh, Sam.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, med school is just the beginning of the process. There are internships and residencies to consider, and then who knows what after that and before you know it ten years or more is gone. Then what?”
“And those ten years? What’s so important about getting married that it can’t wait?”
“Kids for one, Sam. And then what else can happen in all that time. Maybe she meets someone else and decides I’m not the one…”
“That kind of shit can happen regardless of the time and place, Ted, and you can’t live your life in fear of shit like that. If your love is the real deal that kind of stuff isn’t usually a factor. On the other hand, having kids is a big deal, a solid commitment. You think the two of you are ready to take that on?”
“Not right now, no sir. But maybe in a few years, maybe after living together a couple of years, well, I think we’d know by then.”
“What? Living together? Or married?”
“I’d marry her tomorrow, Sam. You know that.”
Sam smiled and nodded. “Yes, that was clear the first time you showed up on my doorstep. You were smitten, always had it bad.”
“I still do, sir. She’s the one. I can hardly breathe when we’re apart.”
“Sure you’re just not horny?”
Ted coughed at that. “Sir?”
“I assume you’ve nailed her…more than once, right?”
“Sir?” Ted said, his face turning bright crimson.
“Ted? Get your act together. And I mean now.”
“Uh…”
“Look, Ted. Basic premise here, so listen up. When someone tries to fuck with your head like this they’re looking for an angle, a weakness they can exploit. Get you off balance, on guard, then while you’re flustered and weak…that’s when the big shit goes down. You’re an easy mark then, in that moment, and that’s when people take advantage of you. Got it?”
“Sam? What’s this all about?”
“A new flick. Working title is Falling Water. It’s kind of a World War Two romance thing but the script we’ve got is remarkable. I’m going to Paris to see if we can get Deneuve signed, and I want you there. But here’s the problem; because you’re young, people are going to try and fuck with you, fuck with your head…”
“Understood, but I need to know your objectives, sir.”
“My objective? Ted, my objective is to turn you loose and see if you can sign her.”
Ted nodded his head slowly. “Okay. I can do that.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed at that. “You know anything about Miss Deneuve?”
“Yessir. A little.”
“Well, that’s why Jack’s here. Talk to him. God knows he’s still infatuated with her, and he knows everything there is to know about her. How’s your French?”
“Decent enough. At least I think I can hold my own.”
“Well okay, we’ll see. Her English is, well, let’s just say she tries.”
“Okay. Is Kat coming with us?”
“Kat? No, why would she? This is work, Ted, not a vacation.”
“Understood.”
“Now, this stuff with your father…is it going to fuck with your head?”
Ted shook his head. “No sir, not at all.”
“Okay. Now, tell me, do you see Dustin playing a romantic lead opposite Deneuve?”
“Is it a comedy or a drama, sir.”
“Call me sir one more time, Ted, and I’m going to pitch your ass overboard.”
“Look, Sam, there are just a few people in the world I respect enough to call sir, and you’re one of ‘em. Cut me some slack, would you?”
Sam nodded. “Let’s call it a drama – with a little fun thrown in to lighten the mood. The male lead has got to be self deprecating and unconsciously funny.”
“Is he a soldier or a pilot?”
“Flyer. Now, what does that tell you?”
“It tells me I need to read the script.”
“In your stateroom there’s an envelope. Let me know what you think by six a.m. tomorrow. You don’t smoke, do you?”
“No sir. Never have.”
“Pot?”
“No sir.”
“Well, you’ve got some reading to do. See you at breakfast, and Ted…I’m sorry if I’m ruining your night.”
Ted nodded. If anyone could understand what Sam was up to it had to be Kat…yet when he made it forward to their stateroom he found the envelope propped on his pillow – and Katharine already fast asleep.
+++++
He’d never been on any kind of private airplane before so getting his initiation in a Gulfstream II was a bit of a trial by fire. Eight sumptuously reclining leather seats and with one stewardess to take care of them, Ted settled into the seat over the right wing and took the proposed shooting budget from Sam and quickly skimmed through the document, making notes as he read, so by the time he finished he hardly noticed that the jet was airborne and now headed northeast over Utah. He handed his notes and observations to Sam who quickly read through them before smiling and looking over at the kid.
“You know, Ted, I’ve got accountants, supposedly CPAs, and I’ve got lawyers by the score working for me, and not one of them has pointed out these problems to me. I saw them immediately, and apparently so did you, but I’m wondering why all these highly paid professionals are missing obvious problems like these. What do you think?”
Ted shrugged noncommittally, then he turned to Sam and spoke: “Hard to say, but lawyers profit by litigating, right, so is it possible that they feel like they can safely ignore these more complex, behind the scenes problems in the early stages of the process, because, well, who knows, maybe they’re hoping these problems will lead to more complex litigation down the road…”
“Once a project is well underway and I’d have more incentive to fight…”
“And so they get more billable hours. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.”
“It’s also illegal and unethical,” Sam sighed.
“So? Show me a lawyer who pays attention to those kinds of niceties and I’ll show you a starving lawyer.”
“Where’d you pick that line up…van Brunkle’s class?”
“Yeah, I guess. That’s just motion picture financing 101.”
“That’s also called cynicism, Ted.”
“Which doesn’t make it any less true, does it, sir?”
Sam turned away for a moment, measuring his next words carefully: “Sometimes cynicism is called for, but in the end I’d say rarely so. You have to surround yourself with people you can trust, Ted. If you can’t, well, all I can tell you is you won’t last long in this business.”
Ted held up his notes and looked at Sam. “So, what’s with these people?”
“New kids, just out of the film school. They’ll be working for you on this project, so it’ll be your job to figure out how – and why – they’re screwing things up…all while you’re supervising the writers and production designers and all the other little pieces of the puzzle…”
“And while keeping in touch with the studio, I assume?”
“Yes, that too. Let’s call it a trial by fire.”
“Okay.”
“Think you can handle it, Ted?”
“Yessir. Not a problem.”
Years later, Sam remembered the almost flat affect in Ted’s voice, even more so the look of pure determination in the kid’s eyes – like even as they spoke he was working out in his mind how to go about solving all the inevitable little problems that routinely plagued all poorly run projects. Yet Sam recalled his first project even as he remembered that all Ted had to work with was book learning, not experience.
“Okay, now about all this BS with my daughter and a wedding date. You both graduate next May, and the release date for Falling Water is June 25th, just a month later. She reports for orientation at most med schools in late July, so that leaves about a month. You want to push that hard?”
Ted turned and looked out the window over the jet’s wing and he sighed, then he nodded. “When push comes to shove, sir, getting married is the most important thing – at least it is to me.”
“What’s the most important thing to Katharine, Ted?”
Ted shook his head as he turned to look at Sam. “Going to med school.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“She has her priorities, and I have mine.”
“And your number one priority is getting married?”
“Yessir.”
“Why is that, Ted?”
“My parents, the way they broke apart.”
“There’s no one on this plane that can hear a goddamn thing, Ted. And there’s no need for secrets between you and me, not anymore. What happened with them, Ted? Why the urgency?”
“I’m not really sure I know the answer to that one, Sam, but it feels like my dad has been running from the Germans since 1939…”
“Germans? Really?”
Ted nodded. “But then came the anti-semitism in the city. Once he figured out that there were the same kind of people here in the States he started to come undone…”
“So that’s what led to his…”
“Yessir.”
“And therefore – the whole Israel thing. Well, that makes sense.”
“Does it? I mean, does it really? Israel is like this little island surrounded by shark infested waters, so will he really be that much safer over there?”
“I doubt it, son. Do you ever go to temple?”
“Not really. Not since my bar mitzvah.”
Sam nodded. “You might reconsider that decision, Ted. Katharine has been kind of tolerant about the two of you not going, but there’s a limit to her tolerance.”
“Sir?”
“Temple has played a large role in her life, especially after her mother passed. Don’t ask her to give up that part of her life, Ted. You won’t like the outcome.”
“Yessir.”
“Your father and Israel? He’s getting married there, I hear?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Any date set yet?”
“I think he’s going to try and make if over Thanksgiving break, sir.”
“Makes sense. I assume you’ll go?”
“I’d like us all to go, sir.”
“Me? I’ve never even met your father, Ted. That might not be the best…”
“Sam, I haven’t had a father in a long time, not really. That’s what divorce means, practically speaking, because I hardly know the man now.”
“He’s your father, Ted.”
“And so are you. Anders is a shadow now, sir. Someone I used to know, and more than likely someone I’ll rarely ever see after he leaves.”
“It’s a horrible thing when a father turns away from his family.”
Ted looked down, nodded his head slowly.
“But I suppose you’re correct. All of this is behind your desire to get married now. You feel the need to repudiate your father, to prove him wrong. Yet Ted, wasn’t it your mother who pushed for the divorce – after your father’s breakdown?”
“Yessir, it was.”
“And yet you don’t feel any hostility towards her, do you? Isn’t that odd?”
“She did everything for me, sir.”
“And yet you think your father didn’t? Given the circumstances, isn’t what he gave up all that he had to give?”
Ted looked out the window again, and at his reflection in the glass.
“I’m not trying to push you around, Ted, but sometimes cynicism blinds you to certain obvious truths, but more importantly cynicism keeps you from learning from your mistakes. In a way, cynicism is like a wall you build, brick by brick, between your soul and the wisdom we seek. And maybe cynicism keeps you from seeing your life as it really is.”
Ted turned and looked at Sam. “Did you lose family over there, sir? In the camps?”
“Of course I did, Ted. I lost six million brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. I lost every soul, just as you did, and your father, as well. That is the horror from which your father runs, Ted, and it is that which we acknowledge every Sabbath. So perhaps you’ll join us next week? Perhaps you’ll start to push aside the bricks in your wall?”
Doubtful I’ll be writing much for the next few weeks. Have some tea for me, would you?
A confused land in this section. Proceed with caution…
Part II: The Broken Road
Chapter 8
Beverly Hills, California 15 December 1972
She’d caught his attention the very first time he saw her; before a dance while walking to the campus dining hall. She was a few yards ahead of him and her legs were mesmerizing, yet so was her long, jet-black hair – which hung almost all the way down to her waist. She was wearing black tights and a black sweater, yet he noticed that the tights seemed to accentuate her legs’ every curve and sinew, and he simply couldn’t take his eyes off of her as she made her way to the dance. And even from halfway across the campus of the Westlake School for Girl’s he could hear outrageously loud music blaring from inside the dining hall – in this case King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man – and after going inside he kept a close eye on the girl, paying close attention to who she talked to as she started to mingle in the pulsing strobes.
After a few minutes of watching her and noting that no boys were drifting her way he decided to make his move – just as I Talk to the Wind started to play. He walked right up to her and held out his hands, and she seemed to settle easily into his embrace as they slow-danced through the number. By the end of the song the live band was setting up onstage, so Ted Sorensen leaned in close and asked Katharine Gold if she wouldn’t like something to drink. When she nodded enthusiastically they went out onto the commons and got a couple glasses of punch; with no real plan in mind they went and sat on a bench and talked for a while.
Katharine Gold was a peculiar sort, actually. Usually quite shy, when she’d seen this boy and the way his eyes engaged hers she’d immediately felt at-ease, so much so that she would recall, years later, that all her usual defenses had instantly slipped away. They’d talked and talked and in fact never returned to the dance-floor, content to sit and drift through these magic moments. And perhaps that magic was their common ground – because both recognized this kind of time for what it was. They’d read enough Shakespeare and Byron and Milton to know the score, and though – perhaps – both had doubted such moments in time were anything other than contrived contextual plot devices employed by unscrupulous writers, it didn’t take them all that long to understand that what was happening to them was indeed more than real enough.
Near the end of the evening she’d called her father to let him know that a friend would be driving her home from the dance, yet Ted took his time that evening, not racing over Beverly Glen at his usual breakneck pace – instead wanting to draw out their magic together, to make this moment last. By the time he turned right off Sunset onto Alpine he was already so smitten he could hardly concentrate.
“Turn right, into the next driveway,” she said then, pointing to an ornate iron gate flanked by walls of tall shrubbery.
And so turn he did, though in his trance still not yet realizing where he was. When he switched off the engine and went around to get her door, only then did he look up and take a measure of his surroundings – at the impeccable neighborhood and at her palatial house. Even by Beverly Hills standards this place was huge and he was instantly on guard, even as he held out his hand to help her out of his little Beemer.
“You better come on up. I’m sure Dad will want to meet you.”
And, quite uncharacteristically, Ted began to feel a little uneasy in his skin, even a little unsure of himself – because in his limited experience this place represented something quite unusual, even for him.
And as they approached the entry the massive front door opened, well before they got to the front porch, and Sam Gold stepped out into the ambiguous amber glow of flickering gaslights – and Ted’s heart just about stopped. Sammy Gold had been one of the biggest stars in the Hollywood of the 40s and 50s, and yet at the pinnacle of his career he had moved behind the camera and was now more well known for producing and directing only the biggest productions over at Paramount. And now here he was, his right hand extended in peace, yet when Ted took Sam Gold’s hand in his he felt just like an amoeba under a microscope.
Sam Gold was unlike any other man he’d ever met. He simply didn’t look the part of the doting father, either: urbane and articulate, he was slim and his short hair was bright white, combed neatly back. And while it was eleven at night Gold was still so elegantly dressed it defied description: ivory slacks and a light blue linen blazer, shoes that matched his slacks and that had to have been custom made in London…and Ted took it all in, processing what he saw, instantly calculating the odds of his surviving such an encounter whole and intact.
Yet after sizing the boy up Sam Gold took him by the shoulder and invited Ted into his home.
And into another world.
+++++
Saul Rosenthal came of age in a somewhat progressive reformed Jewish household, a fairly new tradition nonetheless though quite typical of Jewish communities in northern Europe during the first decades of twentieth century. His parents embraced confronting the unjust exercise of power with reason and compassion, and the two brothers – Saul and Avi – had learned to navigate through their adult lives in much the same way. Saul joined the Foreign Ministry soon after he graduated from University, while Avi, the more gifted mathematician of the two, naturally gravitated towards the exciting developments taking place in the university’s physics department. Both had been, of course, more or less infatuated with Imogen Schwarzwald for as long as they’d had hair on their chests, though both understood she enjoyed Saul’s company more.
Saul was the taller brother and he was considered the handsomer. He was a gifted athlete and an accomplished long distance runner all through school, and he simply took better care of himself. Where Avi was unkempt and often frankly neglectful of his self, Saul was always smartly dressed and clean. You might even say that Avi was better suited to the shadows of academia, while – perhaps – that’s why Saul was so well regarded in more refined circles. There is no doubt that this more polished demeanor contributed to Saul’s earning a posting to London soon after he joined the foreign service, in late 1933 – and this despite his religious background.
Yet almost immediately the European landscape shifted, as, of course, did Denmark’s.
And while some saw the shift for what it was, and what such a shift meant for the future of Europe, most Europeans outside of Germany simply turned away from the implications of Adolph Hitler’s meteoric rise to power. Even as the German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei had grown more virulently anti-semitic in the late 1920s there was still a lingering disbelief in the air that all this could happen again, and that for all Hitler’s blustery talk he was simply nothing more than just another boorish, unwashed politician. The German people would soon come to their senses and turn back to the more progressive ideologies of the Republic.
“They just have to, so just you wait and see…”
But there were many people, more often than not those raised within the lingering shadows of European anti-semitism, who took such men as Hitler – and the stated intentions of those close to him – with utmost seriousness. Avi and Saul Rosenthal were two such people; they watched and listened and learned all they could about Hitler’s rise to power and they soon saw it for what it was. They were also among the few who chose to act.
+++++
While Anders Sorensen sank deeper and deeper into his collective past, Tilly seemed to blossom as she more deeply accepted the traditions and customs of her new surroundings in West LA. And just one example of this dichotomy revolved around the holiday festivities at Christmastime. Anders was loath to recognize anything about the holidays beyond the simplest, most traditional expressions of Hanukah, while Tilly – during their first Christmas in Brentwood – put up a Christmas tree then went so far as to string lights around the eaves of her new home.
When, one evening after school, Ted asked her why she had felt the need to do this she had remarked offhandedly that she simply wanted to “fit in,” and besides, the festive atmosphere was all rather optimistic. And now, what with the war in Southeast Asia dragging on and on, she felt that more optimism was just what she and Ted needed most.
Yet when Ted made his monthly hop up to SFO on PSA he was as suddenly immersed in the ancient customs of a much more traditional Judaism, and now his “uncle” Saul was a more integral part of his father’s life. Yet as suddenly, when they went over to the Callahan house in Potrero Hills to celebrate Christmas Eve, he had to slip back into the uneasy space between the two religious traditions – and it was all somewhat confusing to Ted. Imogen hardly ever seemed to know how to react to Christmas, though Lloyd Callahan certainly got into the mood, yet Ted sensed that Harry had grown more and more ambivalent over the years, perhaps as the weight of the conflict within their little family took a toll on them all.
Yet Harry was a cop now. One of San Francisco’s finest. But Harry looked anything but happy. No one mentioned June, Harry’s old girlfriend, and when Ted asked Harry what it had been like in Vietnam all he got in return was a thousand yard stare. When the families gathered around the piano that Christmas Eve, Harry played Silent Night then ran upstairs to his old bedroom – and he didn’t come back down again, either. Yet it was Harry’s hands that had captured Ted’s attention; his hands, and the way they trembled and shook.
Maybe because there was something about Harry’s being a cop that really just didn’t fit – not that Ted knew any cops. Then again, Harry had joined the Army to fly helicopters then gone to Germany, and he’d only decided to go to the police academy after he got back from Germany. Had something happened to him over there?
Lloyd told him that after Harry’s return the Army called him up a few years later and sent him to Vietnam for some kind of special mission, so he hadn’t been over there the usual two years. Yet Ted sensed that Lloyd seemed to be apologizing for his son, almost making excuses for him after he left them sitting around the piano and the silent tree. But in the waning eve Ted had cast a sidelong glance in Imogen’s general direction and he’d recognized her downcast eyes – and then her shaking hands.
Who was these people reacting to? Her husband, his father? What secrets were crushing the love out of this house?
Then a thought came to Ted while they were driving back to the Little Dutch House after their Christmas Eve together. He’d been racing up Beverly Glen a few weeks before Thanksgiving and had been stopped by an LAPD motorcycle cop; he’d also not been completely deferential to the cop and watched, at first amused and then with growing alarm as the cop’s hands began shaking and his voice growing almost hysterically strident. What had at first been an innocuous encounter had grown, in the blink of an eye, into a life or death encounter, and he’d spent days after going over everything he’d said and done out there on the street, trying to figure out what had happened, and what he’d done wrong.
In the end it was the cop’s shaking hands that gave up the game. The cop had been using the power of his position to command a certain level of obeisance, and when Ted’s wasn’t forthcoming the cop took that as a challenge to his authority. Okay. Easy enough to understand, but there was more going on than just that. Again, Ted thought the shaking hands and tremulous voice were the key to it all, because he’d seen the same thing time after time growing up, usually whenever he’d encountered bullies on the playground. Because he’d noticed that when a bully came at him in school he could see the same kind of reaction: the bully’s hands and voice would shake, and the more you challenged them the more upset they became, but it didn’t take too much to figure out that these guys, these bullies, were really just scared. They were, in a word, cowards. The bullies he ran across at school were usually big, fat, and stupid, too – yet the motorcycle cop wasn’t. Then it occurred to Ted that the cop was hiding the depths of a certain kind of cowardice behind the implicit authority of his badge. And, oh yes, his gun, too. His hand had never left the reassuring comfort of that gun, and in Ted’s eye that made the cop a new, very different kind of bully. A more dangerous kind of bully.
So maybe that’s what it was about Harry Callahan that didn’t exactly fit the paradigm he had been constructing in his mind, ever since their last Christmas Eve together.
Neither Harry Callahan nor his mother didn’t appear to be the bully-type, at least they’d never acted like a bully around Ted or his family, so he immediately concluded that it was foolish to make bold, generalized statements like “all cops are bullies,” or “the motorcycle cop on Beverly Glen was a coward,” and neither of the Callahans acted like bullies. Yet as uncertain as he was now, there was one thing that had been made abundantly clear to Ted after his encounter with the motorcycle cop: if you didn’t have such power your life could be rendered meaningless in an instant by to those who possessed it.
And this was an important lesson to learn for a seventeen year old rich kid, a young man who had come of age in the lap of extreme luxury. He’d led a life shielded from this kind of reality by his mother, who took great care to shield him from the day to day life that other children experienced, especially kids raised in places like South Central LA – kids who lived just a few miles from their house in Brentwood. And who knows…maybe it goes without saying that when you grow up in one reality it’s almost impossible to understand what’s happening just a few miles away.
Ted Sorensen watched the evening news as much as anyone else did. He went to a school that was quite literally tailor made to meet the expectations of the richest people in the richest city in America, the kids of movie stars and politicians and musicians, yet the students at his school all seemed peculiarly interested in ‘social justice’ these days, about discrimination and racism and more than anything else they wanted to understand Hate.
Ted Sorensen, you may recall, grew up in the shifting sands of the sixties. And don’t forget he came of age in Southern California, where good vibrations and strawberry fields colored the sidewalks, and where incense and peppermint almost covered the stench of more blood pooling under another Kennedy’s silenced eyes. And then, after Tricky Dick pulled a heist in the Watergate, the world knew the foxes were loose in the henhouse and suddenly there was nothing left to do but laugh at the absurdity of this life. So…everyone laughed, yet no one seemed to feel that anything was especially funny anymore.
What do you call that? Cynicism?
The cynicism of shaking hands?
Maybe. But something was different going on now. Like a rustling of leaves outside your bedroom window, something was stirring out there, something was waking up, coming alive. The sixties were dead and gone now, just like the blood on sidewalks at Kent State. Washed away, reduced to a footnote. Distance was making everything easier to swallow, even disillusionment – but for some, for kids like Ted Sorensen, this disillusioned landscape was nothing so much as it was a new kind of shadowland.
He ran into another bully at school after the new semester began. Another big, fat kid with piggish eyes and a vile tongue. This one didn’t push him around or try to pick a fight. No, this one spat words, and then the bully said that Hitler’s biggest mistake was not making sure that all the Jews were dead. Gas chambers and ovens had obviously not been enough…
Sticks and stones and all that makes a certain kind of sense, yet the hatred Ted saw in the bully’s eyes was unimaginable. He saw a cold, hard blackness in those eyes and he didn’t understand where it was coming from, why someone he hardly knew felt the need to say these things to him.
Ted was so utterly shocked by the outburst he hardly recognized that this bully’s hands weren’t shaking, that this boy’s hatred was a cold, dense place – and that quite suddenly he was in real danger. Again.
Was Hate just another kind of power?
But if Hate was power, what was Love?
As Ted Sorensen looked into the bully’s soul he knew only one thing – that this bully believed what he was saying. Things like Hate and Love were of little consequence in these shadows.
Ah…Happy New Year to you, and may all your pizzas have extra cheese and double anchovies!
Forgotten Songs From An Imaginary Life
Part II: The Broken Road
Chapter 7
Brentwood Heights, California December 1966
Tilly Sorensen didn’t wait for the ink on her divorce papers to dry; she took a position at the UCLA Medical Center that included a teaching position in the medical school and with those in hand she didn’t looked back, not even once. With her generous settlement, including full legal custody of Theodore, moving wasn’t an issue so late in 1964 she moved to Los Angeles and bought a small house just across the 405 from the medical center. She learned of two excellent private schools nearby and enrolled Ted at the one closest to home and within a few months they had both settled into their new routines.
On the last Friday of each month Tilly drove Ted out to LAX and there he hopped on a PSA 727 for the short flight up to San Francisco. He spent these weekends with his father except when the Forty-Niners played home games in the autumn, and he came up for all those games because his dad had season tickets.
Yet there weekends when his old man really wasn’t all there. Like the lights were on but no one was home. Tilly warned Ted there’d be weekends like that – she called these his father’s “time out for Thorazine Days” – and she had even advised her son how to handle things if he got wound up. Because Anders did indeed get wound up, as in really, really manic. These things happened, Tilly said, because patients with manic-depressive disease were notorious for not taking their medications as scheduled, and when they missed a dose the usual outcome was a manic episode.
She’d tried to live with Anders when he came home from the hospital, and while she knew – at least on an intellectual level – how serious manic episodes could become, she’d never expected to take the crash course in handling aggressive outbursts she’d been forced into after his return. Ted had been terrified by these scenes, at least in the beginning, because he simply didn’t understand what had happened to his father, let alone why.
But more importantly, like many kids his age Ted began to internalize his feelings, to bottle them up and keep them hidden from view. Out of sight, out of mind, right? And, like many kids his age the one emotion he internalized was guilt. As in…what did I do to cause this? Whatever it was, I must’ve been the cause, ya know?
Fortunately Tilly caught all the signs. Withdrawal into his room. No interest in school. Growing increasingly combative with his friends…all of the classic symptoms. So she didn’t wait to see how bad things were going to get, because after working the psych wards for almost ten years she knew how this game played out. When Anders was lucid, when he was on his meds, she talked with him about her concerns and in the end he concurred. An amicable split before his psychosis inevitably grew worse was preferable, because at least that way the boy would grow up with decent memories of his father.
So…Anders and Tilly kept things on an even keel, for Ted’s sake.
Yet when Tilly spoke of Anders she had nothing but wonderful things to say about the man, and her new circle of friends in Brentwood and Westwood always wondered about that.
“Do you still love him?” one of these new friends asked her once.
“Oh, yes. Completely. And I always will.”
“So…you aren’t going to remarry?”
“Heavens no! How could I do something like that to him!?”
Which was about the most confusing thing this friend had ever heard in her life.
But in this circuitous way, Ted grew to understand the foundations of his father’s disease. And in a curious way he began to look at everyone he met through the lens of a doting, almost overbearing psychiatrist, wondering what was wrong with them, and what these people were hiding. His was soon a cynical way of seeing the world, and some might go so far as to say the seeds of a dangerous worldview had been planted with these developments.
The missing piece of this puzzle was, of course, Anders.
For just as surely as every planted seed contains a blueprint of the future, Anders had always been a gifted empath, a brilliant surgeon, and a supremely logical scholar. These character traits passed along quite easily, too, so much so that when Ted took the College Boards during his sophomore year at the Harvard School for Boys he scored a perfect 1600. And by then absolutely no one doubted his abilities, for he was, truly, a genius.
And though he could have easily graduated and gone on to college – before his fifteenth birthday – he decided to stay in school. Because he thought – again, he thought – he wasn’t ready for college yet. Probably because he was having way too much fun.
You have to think of Theodore Sorensen as a quite tall and very thin kid that looked a lot like Gregory Peck did at that age, or maybe even Jimmy Stewart. Girls didn’t simply swoon when he walked into a classroom; no, most usually squirmed in their seats and then crossed their legs, a dangling foot swishing away nervously – kind of like a white-tailed deer’s tail, you could say.
And in high school Ted finally developed his father’s innate ability to talk to people. He related to them, perhaps using his father’s empathic abilities, and everyone in school would remember him as an easy going if gangly-legged kid who was super easy to get along with. He had, you might say, no enemies, and in his high school yearbook he was described by one friend as ‘most likely to become a politician, probably the president of Argentina.’ This was not really a compliment.
As soon as Ted got his license Tilly bought him a little BMW, a ’75 2002 tii in British Racing Green with a tan leather interior, and soon enough everyone recognized Ted simply by the sound his little green Beemer made as he raced away from campus, headed up Beverly Glen bound for Sunset Boulevard – and home. He took his first date in high school in that car, and she would also turn out to be his last date because, as it happened, they fell so deeply in love during their senior year together that he asked her to marry him – only…“after we finish college.”
And that’s what happened, too – except by that time Katharine Gold had decided to go on to med school so she saw the wedding happening four years later than previously expected. Theodore Sorensen was, however, not amused. And even then Katharine knew better than to make Ted angry.
+++++
Saul Rosenthal hadn’t seen it coming, of course.
Divorce was an unspeakable thing, at least it still was in his world, so to learn of the Sorensen’s divorce ‘through the grapevine’ had more than rattled him. But, he thought when he first learned of the split, to abandon a sick spouse was just too much.
How could this have happened?
He had been spending, or so it seemed, half his time in Denmark and the other half in Israel, at least in the years right after the war, but his work in Israel was now done. Deciding to open the new Music Company location in San Francisco had already required more and more of his time so after he learned of the Sorensen’s split he didn’t need to make excuses to his staff – he just called SAS and booked another one way seat to Los Angeles.
After taking the train up from LA he found Anders in the ‘Little Dutch House’ packing boxes and profoundly depressed. Over dinner that evening Anders said he could ‘no longer justify the expense’ of such a grand old house and needed to put it on the market, so of course Saul did what Saul always did. He bought the property and leased it back to Anders, for a song. Then he went and purchased a little apartment building close to Fisherman’s Wharf and moved into a tiny studio apartment on the top floor. He, of course, paid cash. “It’s only money!” he told Anders after the deals were wrapped up.
“Yes, I suppose so,” Anders replied, “but not everyone bleeds hundred dollar bills, Saul. Where’d you find all this money?”
And Saul answered that question the way he did whenever someone was stupid enough to ask him that: “You don’t want to know,” was all he said, even to friends.
And perhaps that was because Saul Rosenthal was reluctant to talk about such things for a reason. He had helped resettle survivors of the camps first in Palestine and then, after 1948, in Israel. He was paid for his services by those who could afford them, and for those who couldn’t…well, he helped them, too. Still, he would have never made much money doing such things. And while the music company was a profitable enterprise, especially the rights management end of the business dedicated to publishing music scores, even that income wouldn’t have accounted for the staggering ledgers and balance sheets his accounts accrued in more than one Swiss bank.
No, not hardly.
Because Saul Rosenthal’s main preoccupation in life was settling scores, and that meant working for special interests around the world who wanted to see all the Nazis who fled Germany at the war’s end punished. Not brought to justice, but punished. Killed, by and large, as in extrajudicial killings not sanctioned by any government, anywhere. And by the mid-1960s Saul had made, literally, tens of millions of dollars doing exactly that, and at the height of his operation he commanded a shadow network that spanned the globe.
But all that was fading in importance now. Rosenthal wasn’t what most would consider an old man in the 1960s, but he was a man living in the valley of the shadow. He’d killed so many people during the war, and after, that he could no longer remember them all. He’d killed men. He’d killed women. He’d killed children, the children of evil men who remained out of reach – to send a message. And now he was paying the price, or at least he had been.
Until he met his grandson, Lloyd.
Whose father was someone he knew well, a boy named Harry Callahan, and that could only mean one thing. When he’d first gone to Canada right after the war ended, to help Imogen and that sailor get to Vancouver, he’d fathered her child – and yet he’d never known. Imogen – and Lloyd – never told him that Lloyd was incapable of such an act, that a war wound prevented such a thing from happening. And both had apparently decided to never tell Saul, Harald’s true father, of his paternity.
So, what to do?
Keep his distance, let time and destiny play their parts? Or remain close and shape the outcome? But how? What was destiny, after all, other than the sum total of uncorrelated events shaping an outcome?
Yet Saul Rosenthal should have never worried about such things, for he had already made his contribution to the arc of Harry Callahan’s life. A genetic contribution, a swirling combination of factors and traits that defines every living thing – even you. And yet the frightening matrix of Saul’s heartfelt empathy sat astride the hidden soul of a dispassionate killer, and both had already been set in stone within the boy, just as his mother’s brilliant, if tortured outlook had been settled in code within the spiraling double helix of his life.
In exactly the same way that Ted Sorensen’s life had been pre-defined.
Yet these two sets of swirling strands of dancing nucleotides were destined to meet time and time again over the span of their existence – as each made their way down the broken road of time towards a final confrontation that stood to unravel the fabric of the universe.
Adrian Leverkühn Writes 