“But my mother never knew that.”
“No, she never did. We tried to find her. I don’t know if she changed her name or anythin’, but we looked for her for almost ten years before we give up. Maybe if we tried harder, if we looked longer, she wouldn’t be here today.”
“You don’t know that. For the most part, Mother had a good life.” I told him about Daddy, the practice, the huge house on the north end of Jubilant Falls, my marriage to Paul, the children – all three of them – and finally, Paul’s death.
“You ain’t had it easy either, have you?”
I shrugged. “Who among us does?” I asked.
“It’s the secrets we keep that’ll eat us alive. That’s the one thing I’ve learned in this life. Marian had her secrets. Your husband had his secrets, and look where it all ended us up.” He gestured at the cafeteria’s institutional décor.
“Yeah, Conrad.“
“That’s Uncle Conrad to you,” he smiled.
I smiled back. “We’re sitting here just finding out about family we didn’t know we had, and we’re taking steps to make sure there are no more secrets.”
“That’s right. No more secrets.”
* * *
Despite the relief of Judge McMullen’s order declaring mother unfit for trial, I still had more left to endure in the Aurora Development case, as the Journal-Gazette was calling it. Grant Matthews never saw a jury, at least as a defendant. When the felonious assault charges against him were upgraded to attempted murder, the man who scarred my face so many years ago curled up like a whipped dog and took the first deal he was offered: testify against Lovey McNair and we’ll give you a mere twenty years, rather than life.
Lovey McNair faced the worst of the charges, conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation to commit murder, fraud, and a total of twenty-three counts of failure to maintain a habitable abode.
The first witness to testify was Elizabeth Kingston. She stepped into the witness box and clearly, but softly, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Lovey stared coldly at Elizabeth, during her testimony, but Elizabeth lifted her chin, and she set up the scene of her rat-infested apartment, of her efforts to keep it clean, and of how unresponsive the staff at Aurora Development was to her requests.
The next witness was Grant Matthews. Deputies led him into the courtroom, shackled at the wrists and ankles. Yeah, you’re a big man now, I thought, watching him shuffle across the courtroom as his manacles rattled. Hearing Grant Matthews talk about how Lovey had engineered the attempted hit on Marcus turned me cold.
“He was writing a story that was going to make her company look bad. She didn’t want everyone in town to know how badly she let some of the apartments get, how repairs were never made,” Grant told the court.
Up on that stand, the man who often left me cowering in a corner or screaming for help those many years ago suddenly didn’t look very frightening to me anymore.
"But the story ran the day before. It was already in print," the prosecutor asked. "If you were assigned to stop that story from running, you failed, didn't you?"
Grant shook his head. "Not completely. That was only part of the job. The other part was to get Mr. Henning."
Maybe it was the passage of time, maybe it was my own empowerment, I don’t know, but Grant Matthews looked like the slimy worm he truly was. I thought about that brick through my window all those months ago. My fear of that night changed from weakness into rage and from that rage to strength. He didn't scare me anymore; he couldn't. From my seat in the spectators’ gallery, I glared at him throughout his testimony.
“And didn’t the defendant have other reasons for wanting the reporter dead?” the prosecutor asked.
Grant paused. “She told me it was because this reporter was bothering her partner’s daughter,“ he began.
“And is it not true that woman was your ex-wife?” The prosecutor snapped.
“Yes, sir.” Grant hung his head. I felt the eyes of the courtroom spectators turn my way. I lowered my own eyes and slipped quietly out of the courtroom.
Marcus was coming down the marbled-tiled hall, apparently the next scheduled witness.
“Kay, I…” he started to say. The attorney beside him grabbed his arm and shook his head at Marcus. Don’t speak. Don’t say anything.
I locked myself in the last stall in the ladies’ bathroom and sobbed. Everything was gone, everything that mattered; I lost my mother, my husband, and the man I loved, all within a year. It was a burden I didn’t think I could carry, but what choice did I have? My anguish bounced off the gray bathroom tiles, until I didn’t think I could cry anymore.
It only took the jury four hours to find Lovey McNair guilty of all charges. At her sentencing, Martin Rathke argued that at her advanced age and with no prior record, she would not be a threat to the community.
“It seems to me, counselor, that with this lengthy list of charges she has been a threat to the community, to members of staff of our local newspaper, and to the tenants of Aurora Development for some time,” Judge McMullen thundered.
In the end, she got ten years.
In one of her husband David McNair’s few acts of spine, he forced his wife to sell all her interest in Marlov Enterprises to me, then closed up the house and moved to Florida. I don’t know if he ever visited Lovey in the minimum-security wing of the women’s prison in Marysville. I know I never did.
I'm told Marcus gave an impressive speech to the media assembled on the courthouse steps after the verdict, grand and glorious in his old flamboyant style. This had been what he wanted after all, a chance to get his career back on track, a chance to practice what he called real journalism. He finally had gotten his big story, but the price had been too high, for both of us. Afterward, he went back to the newsroom, cleaned out his desk, and disappeared.
No one, not even the new editor, a woman named Addison McIntyre, knew where he went.
Jess gradually recovered, although it took him a slow six months at a rehab clinic in Cleveland. His pretty-boy good looks were destroyed in the attack. The left side of his face hangs a little now, and sometimes he drools a bit, but once he gets out of his wheelchair, he claims, he's going back to newspapering.
As guardian of Mother's estate, I made sure that all his bills were paid directly from her funds and established a college fund for his daughter, Rebecca. It went a long way in curing the animosity Jess had always felt about me. At my last visit, I couldn’t resist asking if they’d heard from Marcus.
"What do you hear from Marcus these days?" I stared into my coffee, to avoid the embarrassment of seeing his wife, Carol, wipe the saliva from her husband’s chin.
"Not a thing. No one knows where he's gone, or what he's doing." Jess's words were slow and measured, but his intelligence was still intact.
"I tried to call his parents in Chillicothe," said Carol. "But I didn't get anywhere. Either they wouldn't tell me, or they really didn't know."
"Elizabeth Kingston has heard from him a few times by letter," Jess said.
"Was there a return address? Is he okay?" I clutched my coffee cup harder, hoping I didn’t sound as desperate as I felt.
Jess shook his head. "She wouldn't say. I think it's best that everybody move on, Kay. He's gone for good."
So, I had lost him completely.
I resigned as director of the literacy center, although the board begged me to stay. In the end, I was made an at-large board member and had a hand in choosing my successor. But there were other, bigger issues to deal with in that run-down neighborhood.
As the new head of Aurora Development, I made sure that all the rental properties surrounding the center were repaired. Ironically, it took less than the bimonthly bill I now received for Mother's care to repair each house.
If Mother had only been strong enough to stand up to Lovey, I wouldn’t be here now.
I closed up that ghastly rental house of ours in the historic district and move
d into Mother's newer house in the north end. There were too many memories of both Marcus and Paul, and no matter what I did I could never escape them. It was a strange sadness that I carried with me then, knowing that events beyond my control cost me both of the great loves in my life. I went through the lists of if only and I should haves, almost every day. I should have married Marcus the first time he asked. What if I forgiven Paul?
It was a strange, lonely Christmas. Paul's absence was made even more conspicuous by the deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield. We still were in the middle of the trials when the First Tactical Fighter Wing based at Langley had been the first unit to deploy to Saudi Arabia that August. I had been too wrapped up in the trial to think much about it.
No doubt, I thought at the time, all we needed to do was show some force, and everything would all end peacefully. An event that would have kept me on the edge of my seat for days passed by like so much background scenery.
My life as a military wife seemed so far away now, a part of my life I finished with, like high school or my first marriage. The places I’d seen, the sands of Florida, the beauty of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay, the mountains of Korea, were part of the past.
Now, as the Christmas tree twinkled in the corner, I couldn’t help thinking that, if Paul had lived, he would have given anything to be there in the sands of the Saudi desert.
He would have also given anything to see that P.J. was here in Jubilant Falls. I hadn’t forgotten about that little boy who was so unaware of all the changes he brought about. As I promised Paul, Conrad, and myself, I would still bring that little boy back to the States and make him a part of this family. It was the one thing left to be settled, one thing that would complete the circle.
A few trans-pacific phone calls to Sister Michael Mary at the orphanage in Songtan City, just outside Osan Air Base, sent me in the right direction. P.J.’s birth certificate had come through and listed Paul as the father, so he was already a U.S. citizen. There were still endless forms to fill out, phone interviews with Korean and American embassy functionaries, and plans to be made.
Finally, just a few days after New Years, twelve months to the day after the death of Paul Armstrong, I left the children in the care of Novella and got on a plane for Seoul.
* * *
“Shilla hamnida – Sonkkum kalkkayo? Excuse me miss, tell your fortune?” The wizened Korean woman held out her hand to me, gesturing that she would read my palm. Her bottom teeth were missing, and wrinkles cascaded down her cheeks like so many dry yellow creek beds. But despite the man’s winter coat that enveloped her tiny frame, I could see her eyes were friendly.
It was two days later, and I was standing on the streets of Songtan City, just outside the Shinjang Mall. I arrived the day before and, after settling into my tiny room at the New Seoul Hotel, fell asleep and slept the sleep of the dead. The next morning, despite the misery of a Korean winter, I decided to walk through the city, just to see what I remembered. I stood outside the oriental-style gates of Osan Air Base, but decided I couldn’t go see the flight line where Paul had met his death. I could imagine plumes of black smoke rising from the twisted metal of his airplane into the Korean sky, and I shivered.
Turning away, I started walking through Songtan City until I found myself in one of Songtan’s shopping areas. Shinjang Mall wasn’t a mall like most Americans consider a mall, with its food courts and ample parking. Instead, the mall was a few city blocks closed to traffic and filled to the brim with small shops and street vendors, each hawking their wares to anyone who passed by, particularly American servicemen and their families who bought the cheap imitations of Rolex watches, Nike shoes, and Levi jeans. The goods, which ran the gamut from factory seconds to outright fakes, would only last a few weeks to a couple months, but it was difficult to turn those dubious bargains down.
While shopping was better in Seoul’s I’taewon market district, my favorite Songtan shop was Mr. Lee’s Leather shop, where you could get eel-skin wallets, custom-made shoes, briefcases, and purses for next to nothing. Tailors also made a killing. During our first tour to Korea, Paul managed to get a suit custom made, including the shirt and tie, for less than a hundred dollars.
The time difference was killing me; it was mid-morning, about ten in the morning, but my body said it was one in the morning back in Jubilant Falls and screamed for sleep. Exhausted, I forced myself to keep walking to acclimate myself, knowing if I laid down again, I’d be spending the next night staring wide-awake at the walls.
Sister Michael Mary offered to meet me at Kimpo Airport, the country’s only major airport. Instead, I chose to take a bus from Kimpo into Seoul and from Seoul to Songtan City.
As I fished through my purse for my Korean phrasebook, I mused that this old woman might give me a little confidence.
“Shilla hamnida – Sonkkum kalkkayo? Excuse me miss, tell your fortune?” she repeated.
Koreans love to have their fortune told. It’s not uncommon to see fortune tellers set up with a small chair and table in many of South Korea’s open-air markets. While they mostly plied their trade to young couples in love, telling them that marriage was or was not in their future, this old woman singled me out this morning when business was slow.
I flipped through the pages of my phrase book; amazing how much Hangul, the native Korean language, I’d forgotten in the four years since Paul and I had been stationed here. “Mullonijo! Sure!” I said, sat down at her little table, and wrapped my own winter coat more securely around my legs. I flipped through the phrasebook again. “Yong-o haseyo? Do you speak English?”
“Yes. Give hand. You listen.” The little old woman nodded and took my hand in hers. Her fingertips were calloused, and there was dirt under her nails as she silently poked and prodded the lines in my palm.
“What do you see?”
She stooped perusing my palm and looked at me. Silently, she held out her hand.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Here.” I pulled out a couple won, Korean dollars, and placed them across her palm.
“Kamapsumnida. Thank you. I see much struggle in past. Much hurt, but many blessings.”
“We all have that, ajumoni, aunt. You could say that about anyone.”
“Is true, but you. I see something else.” She bowed briefly. “I see mirae, rendezvous with the future, a completion of the life circle. You are not here for business, yes?”
“I am here to meet my new son.”
The old woman raised her arms in glee. “Old aunt not wrong often! I see in your hand!” She pounded her own palm with her dirty index finger. “You adopt baby boy? Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Many sons good. Boy have GI daddy?” The government had long kept a tight lid on foreign adoptions of children who were pure Korean; the concept of a multi-ethnic culture was anathema to most Koreans. A father who would not care for his child was also unheard of. That was why so many women who became pregnant by U.S. servicemen were often considered the lowest of the low; without a father to register a child in the family’s genealogical record, that child literally did not exist.
There were a number of Korean adoptions right after the Korean War when times were hard and they couldn’t feed their own children. Now that times were getting better, the government was considering phasing out all foreign adoptions in the future; that didn’t include the Amer-Asian children like P.J.
I nodded. “My husband. My late husband.” I whispered. Wordlessly, I pulled the photo of P.J. sitting on the old nun’s lap from my purse and pushed it across the small table.
The old woman examined the picture closely, and patted my arm. “You good wife, Palm say much happiness awaits after much sorrow. Remember mirae.”
I nodded and stood, taking the picture from her wrinkled, yellow hand. Suddenly, the jet lag seemed to disappear, and I felt stronger and more confident from those few words. I was doing the right thing. I was honoring Paul’s last wishes. For the first time in more than a yea
r, I felt peace.
Later that afternoon, Sister Michael Mary came padding down the wide hall of the Catholic orphanage with her arms outstretched and her blue eyes twinkling. She was a waist-less, post-menopausal woman with a round face and rubber-soled shoes, wearing navy blue polyester pants and jacket along with her black veil.
The orphanage sat close to the underpass from the unimaginatively named National Road One between the Catholic Church and the police station, just a short cab ride from my hotel. Like most buildings constructed after the war, it was western in style.
I clutched my purse and the photo close to me during the cab ride, terrified of what was coming. What if he didn’t like me? What if I didn’t like him? What if I found I couldn’t bond with this baby? Would my resentment of all of his father’s affairs throughout our marriage poison this meeting, or would I be able to look at P.J. as what he really was, the little boy who, because of his mixed heritage, had been abandoned through social convention and whose father had died horribly?
“Mrs. Armstrong! So good to see you!” Her strong arms enveloped me in a bear hug. “How was your flight? Did you get rested? It’s so difficult to fly and get acclimated to the time zone changes. Can I get you some coffee? I’m sure you’re excited to meet P.J. He’s napping right now. We’ve all been so excited to know P.J. is going home with you that we’re all in a bit of a dither.”
“I’m a little nervous,” I said, smoothing my hair. “Scared to death, actually.”
Sister Michael Mary laid a strong arm across my shoulders and steered me down the hallway. “Perfectly understandable! Perfectly understandable! Come, let’s go to my office. You can get settled there. We’ve got a few forms yet to fill out, and then we’ll have Sister Agnes bring in P.J. to you.”
The Major's Wife (Jubilant Falls series Book 2) Page 22
