Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (7 page)

I waited, but when she didn't
elaborate, said, "I'm sorry, but I don't follow you."

"What I'm trying to say is ...
this Perry Hilderly may have been my father."

The statement came from so far
out in left field that it took me a moment to formulate a response.
"Why would you think that?" I finally asked.

"Because, my mother was at
Berkeley then."

"So were thousands of other
people."

"But not—" She broke off, looking
at her watch. "Dammit! It's a long story, and I don't have much time."

"Why don't you start telling me
now. I can wait around for the rest as long as necessary."

"All right." She swiveled back
toward the mirror and fussed nervously with her hair. "As I said
before, I was born in January of nineteen sixty-five. Out of wedlock."
She paused, looking at me in the mirror, as if she was waiting for some
reaction. When she didn't get one, she went on. "My mother's name was
Jenny Ruhl. She was a campus radical, heavily into the protest
movement. Or so I found out later."

"You never knew her?"

Goodhue turned toward me again,
backlit by the glow from the bare frosted bulbs around the mirror. It
softened the planes and curves of her face and she appeared even
younger. When she spoke, her
voice was not as crisp and self-assured as before.

"Oh, I knew her. I can even
remember her—some. But I'm getting ahead of my story. Anyway, my mother
had me on January seventeenth. My father was listed as 'unknown' on my
birth certificate. My mother came from a well-to-do Orange County
family; I guess a lot of the so-called revolutionaries had affluent,
conservative backgrounds. For whatever reason, she never let her people
know about me. Instead, she used the allowance they sent her to farm me
out to an older couple here in San Francisco who ran a little day-care
center and took in kids whose parents couldn't care for them—foster
kids from the welfare department, as well as others like me. Ben and
Nilla Goodhue. They—"

There was a knock at the door. A
woman's voice called, "Jess, you're due on the set. Hurry up!"

Goodhue started. "Jesus, I almost
missed the spot! I've got to get my ass upstairs on the double. Do you
mind staying here—they don't like strangers on the set."

"Sure. I'll wait."

After she left the minutes passed
slowly. I shifted on the wicker chair—which had grown uncomfortable—and
tried to fit Goodhue's claim that Hilderly might have been her father
into what I already knew. I supposed it was possible that Hilderly had
fathered her and written her into his will in a too-late attack of
conscience. But that didn't explain the bequest to Tom Grant. And what
about Heikkinen and Taylor? Other children he'd failed to acknowledge?
Could any young man have been that prolific—even in the sexually free
sixties?

When Goodhue came back, her
forehead was beaded with moisture. She mopped it with a tissue and set
about repairing her makeup. "I've never been that late," she said.
"Never. Slid into the chair with only five seconds to spare."

"I shouldn't have let you lose
track of the time."

"Not your fault. Look, I have
maybe ten more minutes, then I've got to get down to the
newsroom and go over the scripts with my co-anchor. Where was I?"

"Ben and Nilla Goodhue."

"Right." The mention of their
names banished her preoccupation with the time. A gentle, reminiscent
expression stole over her features, and she set down the mascara wand
she was using.

"Ben and Nilla. Great people.
Loving people. He was English, proper as could be, except when he was
rolling around on the rug with us kids. She was Swedish—the Nilla was
short for Gunnilla—and she could warm up a room just with her smile.
They lived in the Portola district. It was nice there back then—solid
working class, a good ethnic mix. Lots of Italian delis and soul-food
places and little corner markets. People had vegetable gardens; the man
next door to us kept chickens. It's not like that anymore; there's a
lot of gang violence, spillover from Bayview and Visitacion Valley—"
She broke off and picked up the mascara wand again, as if she'd
suddenly reminded herself of the shortness of time.

"Anyway," she went on, "that's
where I grew up, in this big house on a corner lot with anywhere from
two to six other kids. They came and went. I stayed."

"Did your mother visit you?"

"Occasionally, until I was four.
I remember her as pretty, but not very warm. When she held me, I always
felt she was afraid she might drop and break me. After she left, I
would sit on Ben's or Nilla's lap for a long time. I couldn't
understand why, if she was my mother, she didn't hold me the way they
did."

"What about your father? Did your
mother ever talk about him?"

"No, but he visited me once. I
was maybe three and a half, close to four. I hoped—or maybe I just
imagine I hoped— that they were going to take me away to live with them
soon, but then he never came again."
 

"Can you describe him?"

She shook her head. "I can't.
Over the years I've tried to picture him, but it's all cloudy. The only
impression I have is that he might have been from the Southwest,
because he wore a string tie. I remember sitting on his lap and playing
with it, clicking the little metal ends on the strings together."

I made a mental note to find out
where Hilderly had originally come from. "You say your mother came to
see you until you were around four. What happened then?"

As she'd spoken of her childhood,
Goodhue's face had become animated. Now it was as if someone had turned
a switch and put out a light. She set down the mascara wand and moved
to perch on the edge of the other chair. "She . . . died."

"How?"

"She ... I didn't know this until
a long time after. Nilla and Ben just told me she'd had to go away, but
that I shouldn't worry because she loved me and would always be
thinking about me. After that they didn't seem to want to talk about
her and, frankly, she'd been such a small part of my life that I sort
of forgot her. But when I was in sixth grade, I heard a couple of the
neighbor kids talking—older kids, who had lived there all their lives.
What happened was she got into trouble—something to do with the war
protests—and then she killed herself."

I felt a stab of sympathy for the
sixth grader who had found out an ugly fact in an unpleasant way. "What
kind of trouble?"

Goodhue shook her head. "The kids
only heard part of the story—picked up-snatches of conversation, the
way kids do. What they told me was that my mother went out to Ocean
Beach one night and shot herself in the head. Ben and Nilla freaked out
when they saw it on the news. I went to them with the story, hoping it
wasn't true, but they wouldn't talk about it. That was the only time
they let me down. Years later, after they were both
dead and I didn't feel that I was betraying either of them, I hired an
investigator to find out the whole story. He verbally confirmed that it
had happened like the kids said it had, and wrote up a report. But—this
is the weird part—you know what I did?"

"What?"

"I burned the damned thing
without reading it. After all those years of wondering and all the
money I'd spent on the investigator, I just didn't want to know."

Reputable investigators, however,
kept copies of their reports on file for quite some time. "Do you
recall the name of the person you hired?"

"Not offhand, but I'm sure it's
somewhere in my records."

"I'd like it, if it's not too
much trouble to locate."

Goodhue looked somewhat
apprehensive. "Why? Do you need it to establish my claim to the
inheritance?"

Given the fact Hilderly had
assumed Hank would know who she was, plus the fact that her name was a
relatively unusual one, I felt it safe to assume she was the right Jess
Goodhue. Still, I replied cautiously, "It would help. And it might also
help me to understand why Hilderly wrote the kind of will he did."

"Why is that important to you?"

I hesitated, then opted for the
answer that I sensed Goodhue—as a newswoman—would understand. "I'm a
truth seeker. I need to know."

She nodded. "You're like me. I'll
look for the name tomorrow, and let you know."

She still seemed oblivious to the
amount of time that was passing, so I pressed on with my questioning
while I could. "After your mother . . . died, what happened to you?"

"Nothing. I stayed on with Ben
and Nilla. I was there unofficially; the welfare department had no idea
I existed. Neither did my mother's family, and my father obviously
didn't care. Ben and Nilla raised me as their own. I took their name.
Ben died when I was fifteen, just keeled over of a stroke at the
breakfast table.
That about killed Nilla, too. She withdrew, closed the day-care center,
stopped taking in kids. Finally I was all she had."

"There had never been much money.
Without what the welfare department paid for the foster kids, things
were rough. I left school at sixteen so I could support Nilla. Got a
girl-Friday job at a stationery supply company, and they trained me as
a secretary. Nilla died when I was eighteen— it was her heart, in more
ways than one. I left the job at the stationery company, and the
Portola district. Moved downtown and got a job as a secretary here at
KSTS. After a year and a half, I convinced them to let me try my hand
as a writer. The field reporting came along pretty quick. And now here
I am." She flung her arms out, as if to embrace the shabby dressing
room, the entire studio, her successful life. But to me she looked like
the little girl whose mother had been pretty but not very warm,
reaching out for the surrogate parents who knew how to hold a child.

I said, "Jess, tell me this: do
you
want
to know if Perry Hilderly was your father?"

Her hands locked together again,
and she compressed her lips. After a moment she said, "You know, I do.
At first, after Nilla died, I was wild to find out about my parents. I
contacted my mother's family in southern California, but they wouldn't
have anything to do with me, wouldn't even believe I was Jenny Ruhl's
daughter, claimed my birth certificate was a fake. It was after that
that I hired the detective. But then—well, I told you what I did with
the report."

"Why is it different now?"

"Because Perry Hilderly left me
money. A lot of money. That must mean something."

I wasn't sure. At least not that
it meant all the good things she was obviously imagining. Guilt at
deeds left undone, I've found, does not necessarily imply love for the
wronged party.
 

Goodhue must have sensed my
doubt, because she stood abruptly. "Look, I've got to get down to the
newsroom. I'll look for that detective's name, give you a call."

I handed her one of my cards. She
pocketed it, checked her makeup a final time, and led me out of the
dressing room. On the way downstairs I asked if there was a phone I
might use, and Goodhue directed me to one at an unoccupied desk in the
newsroom. I called All Souls, found Hank was still there, and reported
my day's findings.

"Damned curious," he said when I
finished. "It doesn't quite fit with what I know of Perry. I can't see
him abandoning his own child."

"Did you break the news to his
former wife about the sons not getting their inheritance?"

"Yes. She didn't seem very upset.
Apparently she and her new husband are quite well off. She was happy
about the personal stuff, though—said what you did about it being nice
for the boys, who will have something to remember Perry by."

"I'd like to talk with her. If anyone might know about Hilderly's past,
she's the one. Will you give me her new name and number?"

"Sure." There was a pause, and then he read off the information to me.
"You're not planning on going out to Danville tonight?"

"If she'll see me."

Hank was silent.

"Oh, Lord, your dinner party for
Anne-Marie! I almost forgot."

"Look, don't worry about that. Go
see Judy Fleming and come by my place later. But just be sure to come."

"I will, I promise. Is Rae
around?"

"She left about fifteen minutes
ago. Asked me to tell you she's turned up something on Heikkinen;
she'll talk to you about it tonight."

"Okay. Keep some chili warm for
me." I hung up and placed a credit-card call to Judy
Fleming, the former Mrs. Hilderly, in the exclusive East Bay
development of Blackhawk. She was cordial and agreed to see me if I
didn't mind driving over there in rush-hour traffic. I said I'd be at
her house as soon as possible.

As I crossed the newsroom toward
the hallway, I glanced at Goodhue's cubicle. The anchorwoman was again
seated at her desk, next to her co-anchor, Les Gates. Gates, whom I
recognized from countless newscasts, was expounding on a script that
lay in front of them. Goodhue nodded and responded, but her expression
was distracted. When I passed the cubicle, she looked up, and I felt
her gaze upon me all the way to the door.