The Most Dangerous Animal of All (6 page)

By the time they reached the beach house, the animosity my father felt for his new stepmother had reached a fever pitch. Grabbing his bag, he stomped up the stairs into the house, ignoring Louise, Aileen, and Bits when they said hello. He ran into his usual bedroom, slammed the door, threw himself on the bed, and cried. He was still crying when Earl walked in.

“I had hoped you would have grown up some and learned how to behave yourself properly, but apparently your mother has not been disciplining you,” Earl said, pulling off his belt. “You will treat my wife with respect. Now bend over,” he added sternly.

Aileen and Bits were listening and giggling down the hall. “He just got here. What do you think he did?” Bits said.

“I don’t know, but it must have been bad. Uncle Earl sounds real mad,” Aileen replied.

The next morning, Aileen was waiting for him in the hall. “How’s your backside?” she said, laughing. Van punched her in the arm. Hard.

It didn’t take long for Van’s cousins to pick up where they had left off when he moved. At breakfast, the girls began making fun of him for reading a book at the table. When Aileen accidentally spilled milk on his book, Van exploded.

“Don’t cry over spilt milk,” his cousins jeered.

“You have no idea. This is a first edition,” Van cried, grabbing his book and running into the kitchen to tenderly dry each page.

The girls spent the summer teasing him mercilessly. One afternoon, as Van sat alone on the handrail of the second-floor porch, reading, Ellie asked him to go to the car and fetch her sunglasses. Startled from his book, Van fell over the railing, landing on his head in front of the whole family. Ellie screamed when Van hit the sandy ground with a thud. For a moment, everyone thought he was dead. Embarrassed, my father lay there stunned for a moment, then got up, brushed the sand from his clothes, and disappeared into a far room in the back of the house to cry. He knew this was more ammunition for his cousins. He was different and could not fit in. And he didn’t care enough to try. He preferred rummaging through an old trunk he’d found in the attic, looking at the crinkled papers and yellowed christening gowns someone had tucked away years ago, rather than playing silly games. He didn’t want to run on the beach with them or swim in Withers Swash. He wanted to be left alone with his books, his escape from his family.

His cousin Mildred had already escaped.

She had disgraced the Best family the year before when she gave birth out of wedlock to a baby girl named Joyce. Mildred promptly ran off to Hollywood with an aspiring Cuban actor, leaving her child to be raised by her aunt Estelle. Joyce would be raised to believe that her aunts—Bits, Louise, and Aileen—were her sisters, and her great-aunt, Estelle, was her mother.

As the summer wore on, Van began longing for San Francisco. His dark, lonely bedroom was more tolerable than this.

Earl realized early on that it was fruitless to try to force Van and Ellie’s relationship. Van made no bones about his hatred for his stepmother, and he constantly tried to make Earl see that she was mean to him, hoping his father would send her away.

On the way home from the beach, things finally came to a head. Ellie was talking with Earl, and Van interrupted, smiling because he knew it would make her mad.

“Van, has anyone invited you to this conversation?” Ellie said.

“I didn’t need an invitation to speak before you came along,” Van said smartly.

Earl slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road. He grabbed Van, yanked him from the car, and spanked him in front of his cousins and everyone driving by. Humiliated, Van huddled in the corner of the backseat, ignoring his laughing cousins, staring daggers into the back of Ellie’s head. He dreaded the coming weeks he would have to spend with his stepmother and cousins, who Earl had decided should spend the remainder of their summer vacation in Indiana.

Once back on the road, my grandfather stopped in every state along the way—North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana—and let each of the children drive a few feet, just so they could tell their friends they had driven in different states. Van wanted to refuse to participate, but one look at Earl’s face when his turn came convinced him otherwise. He drove slowly, sitting in the driver’s seat next to Ellie, his knuckles white on the wheel.

From the backseat, Bits watched Van and almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

6

After that first miserable summer with Ellie, Van was almost happy to see his mother when he returned to San Francisco. He ran into the bedroom that housed his most precious possessions, feeling lighthearted for the first time in months. Here he was safe from the outside world, safe from the teasing of other children. His feelings of happiness were fleeting, however.

Gertrude had met a new beau while Van was away. Within months, she married John Harlan Plummer, a man who had little tolerance for Van and who was jealous of any attention Gertrude paid to her son. Van learned quickly to stay out of Harlan’s way. The only times Van saw his mother were at the dinner table and when he played the piano. Sometimes when she heard him playing, she would come into the living room, sit beside him, and give him pointers. It was during these times that Van felt a bond with her, but then Harlan would call her name and she would disappear. Left alone again, Van pounded his heartache into the piano keys.

Then he met William Vsevolod Lohmus von Bellingshausen and everything changed.

Fear had raced through Van’s body when he first walked through the double doors of Lowell High School. He observed the pretty girls laughing and joking with boys who seemed unconcerned with the enormity of high school, knowing it wouldn’t be long before they uncovered his secrets, their whispers reverberating down hallways between classes.
His mother’s a whore. Did you see those glasses he wears? What’s wrong with him, anyway? He thinks he’s so smart.

“Guten Tag
,
”
Van said in German when a boy sat next to him in the cafeteria on the first day of school—his way of saying hello and establishing superiority with anyone he met.

“Guten Tag
,
”
the boy unexpectedly responded.
“Wie heißt du?”

“My name’s Van. You speak German?” Van said, stunned that this ordinary-looking kid had caught him at his game.

“My name is Vsevolod von Bellingshausen, and I am German. And Chinese. Half and half. But in the States, I go by William Lohmus. Just makes it easier,” the boy informed Van, smiling at the look on his face.

William and my father became fast friends, and they soon began scheduling their classes together. In ROTC, they befriended Bill Bixby, who would later rise to fame for his work in the television series
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
and
The Incredible Hulk
. The three boys went through drills three times each week, and on Mondays and Fridays they studied military history, tactics, and theory. During summer maneuvers, they were Company C and took on the role of the enemy, hiding under brush until the single guard passed by and then swooping in like lightning to claim the flag and victory. Van occasionally called Earl to discuss what he was learning, confident that his gaining military knowledge would impress his father.

After school, Van volunteered at the de Young Museum, in Golden Gate Park. In the Ancient Arms room, he honed his skills cleaning, maintaining, and preserving medieval weapons. It was in that museum filled with relics from the past that Van became fascinated with weaponry and the art of killing.

William and Bill realized that Van was different, but that he was also very intelligent, and they enjoyed listening to him pontificate on this topic or that. He knew a little something about almost everything. They were also impressed with his musical talent.

“Where did you learn to play like that?” William asked one afternoon when Van was showing off on the piano in his living room.

“Mother taught me,” Van replied. “I also listen to a lot of classical music and operas. I’ll show you.”

Van introduced William to Giacomo Puccini’s
Tosca
, another tale of lust and murder that Van particularly liked. “Puccini adapted ‘Miya Sama, Miya Sama’ from Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Mikado
,” Van explained. Before long, William became a fan, and the two boys spent their evenings reciting the words from
The Mikado
to each other until William knew them as well as Van.

At school, they mostly spoke to each other in German, which annoyed and alienated the other students. But when Van joined the English-Speaking Union, an organization with the charter to preserve the language and culture of the motherland, he began to cultivate a proper English accent and called everyone by their surname, which was similarly annoying to his classmates.

“You know, Bellingshausen, my family roots trace back to England and royalty,” Van bragged. “My father told me I am a distant relative of Queen Elizabeth.”

William didn’t know whether to believe him, but he let him have that one, because you never really knew with Van. And when his friend’s assumed accent sounded like someone caught in the middle of a conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, William just smiled. He let Van have that, too.

But whenever Van turned the conversation to an Asian slave box, a four-inch cube made of dark wood that William had once shown him, William got a little nervous. Van believed that some cultures collected the souls of their slaves for the afterlife in boxes like that one, and Van had become fascinated with the notion of killing one to put in the box. Walking together down the hallway between classes, Van would often point out a pretty girl. “She’d make a good one, don’t you think?” he would say, and laugh.

William knew what he meant and worried sometimes that Van wasn’t joking.

7

After graduation, in 1953, William left San Francisco to spend several months in Mexico, sailing away on a sixty-eight-foot yawl. Van had other plans. He had befriended Alexander Victor Edward Paulet Montagu, a member of British Parliament, at an English-Speaking Union meeting. Montagu, commonly known as the Viscount of Hinchingbrooke, had been impressed by Van’s knowledge of England and amused by his stiff British correctness. He took a fancy to Van and invited his young American friend to England for a stay at his father’s home, Hinchingbrooke House, with the promise of meeting the queen. Excited about the prospect, Van convinced my grandfather to buy his passage to England as a graduation present.

On May 4, 1953, the RMS
Ascania
safely sailed into the port in Liverpool, England, and Van disembarked to begin his adventure.

The viscount had arranged for a car to bring Van to the family estate, just outside Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, some three hours southeast of Liverpool. Although Victor maintained a residence in London, he had arranged for Van to have the pleasure of experiencing high country living. Originally, the massive house had been built as a church, around 1100. It had later become a nunnery before coming into the possession of Richard Williams (also known as Richard Cromwell) in 1536. Cromwell and his sons added numerous rooms, a medieval grand entrance, and the Great Bow Window that gave Hinchingbrooke House its distinct character. Debt forced the Cromwells to sell their prized possession to the Montagu family in 1627. The Montagus continued with improvements, and when it came into the possession of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, Hinchingbrooke House became known for its lavish parties, hosted by the earl and his mistress while his wife lived her life tucked away in a sanatorium.

When they pulled onto the grounds of the manor, Van noticed the family’s coat of arms. The words
Post tot naufragia portum
(“a haven after so many shipwrecks”) served as the family motto.

Once inside the majestic home, my father was struck by the smell—a mustiness that had seeped for centuries into every crack and crevice of the dwelling. Immense portraits lining walls, elaborate draperies, exquisite furnishings, scented candelabras—nothing could overcome that first impression. Van sniffed and covered his nose.

“My American friend,” Victor Montagu said when he greeted Van as he emerged from a shadowy hallway. “How was your trip?”

“It was good, Sir Montagu,” Van said, looking up at the man approaching him.

At forty-six years of age, the viscount was a striking figure—tall, with broad shoulders and a slender build. “Welcome to my family’s home,” he said, instructing the manservant to show Van to his room.

Over the next few weeks, Van received a thorough education in English history and politics as he and the viscount alternated their time between Hinchingbrooke and London. Victor Montagu had become very involved in politics as a young man and had a wealth of knowledge to bestow upon his guest. He had served as the private secretary to Stanley Baldwin, a well-respected lord president of the council, and had written several books by the time Van met him. He had also served in World War II before being elected to Parliament. Van absorbed every word the viscount said, storing each new bit of information in his memory, to be revisited later with William, especially the fact that Queen Elizabeth and King James I had slept within these walls.

But Van had trouble sleeping within those walls. Each night, he listened intently to the sounds of old boards creaking, cracking, as if someone or something was walking the halls. The sounds would get closer and closer, louder and louder, until Van huddled under a blanket in the corner of his room. Watching.

Waiting.

For hours.

And then morning would dawn and the sun would cast its reassuring light across the room. Van would finally close his eyes and sleep until breakfast was served, where he usually ate only a piece of bacon or two with his tea.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Victor asked as he wolfed down baked beans, sausage, bacon, eggs, and fried bread.

“Mother rarely cooks breakfast, so I’m not used to eating a lot in the morning.”