Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (42 page)

"Why did he choose to distance
himself from his sons?"
 

"That was his way. It was one of
the reasons I divorced him. The main reason, actually." She paused.
"I've always loved Perry, though. That's why this business of him
disinheriting the boys is so hard to take."

"Hank Zahn had the impression you
don't mind about the money."

"About the money, no. It's
Perry's lack of caring and the . . .
inexplicableness
of what
he did that's disturbing."

"So far I've been able to locate
two of Perry's new beneficiaries—Thomas Y. Grant and Jess Goodhue. Did
he ever mention either of them to you?"

She shook her head.

"What about a David Arlen Taylor,
Libby Heikkinen, or Jenny Ruhl?"

"None of those names is familiar.
I'm sure I'd remember if I'd known or heard of them."

"Well, neither of the two I've
spoken to claims to have known Perry, or understands why he would name
them in his will. Perhaps when I locate Taylor and Heikkinen, they can
shed some light on his reasons. The other person I mentioned, Jenny
Ruhl, was the mother of Jess Goodhue. Goodhue thought her mother might
have known Perry at Berkeley."

"That would have been long before
I met him."

"When was that, and where?"

"At S.F. State, after he'd come
back from Vietnam. I was only nineteen; he was several years older, and
very intriguing to me. A distant, silent,
haunted
man, who had
already lost a wife and a child. I thought I could help him, bring him
out of himself. That's how naive I was!"

"I take it he remained distant."

"Yes. It wasn't until after my
first son, Kurt, was born that I realized how distant. I remember
looking at Kurt and wondering which of us he would be more like—Perry
or me. And then it came to me that I knew virtually nothing of the man
who had fathered him."
 

"Do you mean what he thought and
felt, or actual biographical details?"

"Both. Oh, he'd sketched out a
chronology for me when we first met, but it was more like an outline,
with none of the substance."

 "Where was Perry
originally from?"

"Albuquerque."

I thought of the father wearing a
string tie who had visited Jess Goodhue. "Did he speak of his
childhood?"

"More than any other part of his
life. It sounded fairly normal. I never met his father; he died when
Perry was in high school. His mother had remarried and they traveled a
lot; I only met her once. She was quite outgoing, so wherever he got
his remoteness, it wasn't from her."

"And you divorced Perry ten years
ago?"

"Ten years next month. Toward the
end we were living in Pacifica. We'd bought a house. Perry commuted to
the city. He kept long hours—purposely, I thought. It wasn't as if he
didn't love the boys or me; he just couldn't cope with the intimacy of
family life. Eventually he became more like the fog that drifted in and
out, rather than a husband or father. I felt as if I were failing him
when I divorced him, but he seemed more relieved than anything else. I
guess he'd gotten in over his head emotionally by marrying and having a
family."

The kind of uninvolved individual
Mrs. Fleming described didn't mesh with the young man who had clowned
and laughed his way through the stormy days at Berkeley. Even the man
Hank had known in Vietnam had sounded more connected to others. I
wondered if it had been the deaths of the woman and child over there
that had changed him. But even when they had been alive, Hilderly had
been closed off in certain respects,

I asked, "After the divorce, did
you see Perry?"

"Very occasionally. He'd pick up
the boys on their birthdays to take them to the city to the zoo or a
ball game. On Christmas he'd send gifts—usually
ones that were inappropriate for their age levels—and call. But that
was the extent of it."

I'd been wrong in thinking Judy
Fleming knew anything useful about her husband's past. "I know you find
Perry changing his will inexplicable," I said, "but I'd like to ask you
to think over the contacts you and your sons have had with him in, say,
the past year. Was there anything in his behavior that even hinted he
might do such a thing?"

She considered, pleating the
fabric of her skirt between her fingers. "One occasion comes to mind.
Perry was behaving oddly . . . but maybe you'd best talk to Kurt about
it. He was there and I wasn't." She went to the glass door and opened
it, called out to one of the boys by the pool. He came to the house,
toweling himself off as he walked.

At around sixteen Kurt looked
quite a bit like early pictures of his father. He was tall and lanky,
but possessed of a natural grace; his hair was blond, curly, and
somewhat on the long side. He shook my hand and greeted me with a
directness unusual in one of his age.

The introductions over, Kurt sat
down on the raised stone hearth, his long arms wrapped around his bare
knees. His mother said, "Tell Ms. McCone about your birthday
celebration with Perry." To me she added, "Neither of the boys felt
close enough to call him 'Dad.' That's what they call my husband."

Kurt asked, "You mean tell her
about the weird stuff?"

Judy Fleming nodded.

"Okay. This was in the middle of
June, a Saturday. I went into the city on BART and we took in a Giants
game. Perry was kind of quiet. I thought it might be because for my
present he'd given me this video game that was really for young kids,
and I couldn't work up much enthusiasm over it." Kurt paused, looking
at his mother. "He was always doing that. You remember the year he gave
me the big stuffed koala bear for Christmas?
I was thirteen and into Indiana Jones."

Mrs. Fleming merely smiled.

"Okay," Kurt went on, "after the
game we started back here and stopped in Walnut Creek at a Mexican
restaurant. Perry got into the margaritas. They make a strong one
there—" He glanced at his mother again. "Or so I'm told. Perry had
four. After the second he started going on, sort of—what's that word I
just learned? Maundering." He seemed to savor the new word; his mouth
shaped it as if he were tasting each syllable.

"About what?" I asked.

"All sorts of stuff. He started
by asking me if I'd decided on a college yet, but before I could
answer, he said that the decisions people make early on are important,
that the wrong one can change the whole course of your life. He said
that even a right decision can come back at you later, even if you know
you did the right thing."

"That sounds like fairly standard
father-to-son advice."

"You didn't know Perry. He wasn't
much on advice. Anyway, then he started going on about this seminar
he'd had to go to for his job a couple of weeks before. He said he
hadn't wanted to go, but that it was one of the best things that ever
happened to him. 'It's changed my whole life,' he said. 'I know what I
have to do to get in touch with my former self.'"

"Those were his exact words?"

"More or less."

"What kind of seminar was it?"

"He didn't say, and I couldn't
ask; he was getting
really
weird by that time. Then he started
in on . . . well, what he said was, 'You can't beat yourself up for
being unable to control the consequences of your actions.' And other
stuff along that line."

It sounded to me as if Hilderly
had been trying to articulate the preachings of a pop
psychologist to his son—and had not done too good a job of it.
"Anything else?"

"Well, there was some stuff about
ideals. How you should hang on to them, but sometimes you had to dump
some in order to live up to the most important of all. And then he got
into guilt and atonement. All the time I was trying to eat my
enchiladas, he was sucking up margaritas and carrying on like a
born-again."

"Maybe he
had
gotten
involved in some religion; there's a lot of that going around."

Kurt looked dubious. His mother
said, "I can't imagine that. Perry was a lifelong atheist."

 "What else
did he say?" I asked Kurt.

"Not much that made any sense.
It worried
me; I'd never seen him that way before. Like Mom says, I wasn't close
to Perry, but he was a nice man, and I hated to see him sort of ...
losing it. You think maybe he was cracking up, and that was why he made
that weird will?"

"Maybe." I made a mental note to
ask Hilderly's former employer about the seminar he'd attended late in
May.

"Well," Kurt said, "whatever made
him do it must have been really something. I know he loved my brother
and me, even if he was sort of off on another planet most of the time."
Up to now Kurt had sounded almost cavalier about his last dinner with
his father, but as he spoke a tremor came into his voice. He turned to
his mother. "I wish I could have done or said something—you know, to
let him know I cared."

Judy Fleming said, "Kurt, he knew
you cared."

"But there should have been
something.
I'm sorry
now that all those years I wasn't a better son to him."

Quickly she went to him and put
her arms around his shoulders. "You
were
a good son. You were
the best you could be, under the circumstances."

She could easily have countered
Kurt's feelings of regret by pointing out that Perry hadn't been much
of a father, but
instead
she'd chosen the more
difficult option of refusing to degrade her former husband's memory.
She may, as she'd said, have let Hilderly down when she divorced him,
but now, at the end, she hadn't failed him.

On the way back to the city I
stopped at a K-Mart to buy a birthday card and a hanging fuchsia plant
for Anne-Marie. By the time I reached the building she and Hank owned
on Twenty-sixth Street in Noe Valley, it was close to ten and a
refreshing fog once more enveloped San Francisco. I went up on the
front porch, fuchsia dangling from my hand, and surveyed the row of
hooks for plants that Anne-Marie had installed in front of the door to
her first-floor flat; one was still vacant, and the space was the right
size for my gift. I turned, nodding in satisfaction, but something
across the street caught my attention. I looked back. There was no one
over there, at least no one discernible, and all I heard were distant
traffic noises and voices down the block.

In a few seconds I turned away
again, remembering the conversation I'd had with Hank on Saturday, when
he'd described his paranoid feeling that someone might have been
lurking around outside All Souls. "Nerves," I'd said. "Typical urban
ailment," he'd said. Right on both counts. Quickly I went to the door
of the upstairs flat and rang the bell.

Anne-Marie and Hank are one of
those couples who, once married, discovered they couldn't live
together. She's fastidious, he's just plain messy. She values a
routine, he thrives on chaos. In the end they solved the problem by
occupying separate flats in the same building—far enough apart, but
never out of reach.

The
buzzer
sounded, and
I pushed the door open and climbed the narrow flight of stairs. The air
was redolent of chili—an aroma that in the past would have made me
cringe, because Hank's secret recipe was one he should have carried
untried to the grave. But the previous winter Anne-Marie had critiqued
it in a fit of anger, I had backed up her damning judgment, and since
then Hank had made a concerted and moderately successful effort to
improve it. Not that it mattered: nobody went to Hank's for the food.
We went for the good talk and company.

I hung my coat and bag on the
hall tree and walked to the rear of the flat. Hank had reversed the
typical order of the rooms, turning the front parlor into his bedroom
and merging the remaining ones into a big space for entertaining that
opened off the kitchen. It was back there that I found him and his
three remaining dinner guests, scattered on the sectional sofa, coffee
or wine to hand.

Anne-Marie sat closest to the
door. I went over and plunked the fuchsia and card on her lap. "Happy
birthday."

"Thank you! I'm glad you could
make it." She examined the
plant, then ripped open the envelope. Since I'd last seen her, she'd
cut her long blond hair, and the pert new style enhanced the delicacy
of her elegant nose and sculpted cheekbones. The haircut was the latest
in a series of changes in her life, the most startling of which was
taking an extended leave of absence from All Souls to act as consulting
attorney to a large coalition of environmentalists. I wondered what had
prompted the move, but so far had not found the right opportunity to
ask. Anne-Marie laughed at the card—which likened our lives to the fast
lane at the
supermarket checkout—and passed it to Hank. He nodded in agreement and
handed it to Rae, who sat on the other section of the sofa. Willie
Whelan, dressed in his usual leather vest and western wear, sprawled
next to her, his head lolling against her shoulder. I noticed there was
something wrong with his face—it looked puffy. He raised a listless
hand to me, then let it drop back onto the couch.