by James Ellroy
Willem showed up at nine o’clock, when the bank opened. Marcella waited until he finished his transactions, then walked across the street to wait for him. He came out the door a few minutes later, carrying a brown paper bag full of money. When he saw Marcella there was a fearful silence, then she rushed at him and flung the paper bag to the ground, spilling its contents. Greenbacks drifted down Main Street in the April wind, and the crowd watched in horrified awe as fourteen-year-old Marcella DeVries wreaked her revenge. She punched, scratched, kicked, and bit Willem Berglund, pummeling him to the ground, pulling the whiskey bottle out of his waistband and spilling the contents over his head, cursing him in English, Dutch, and German until her throat and rage gave out.
She reserved the worst of her wrath for her father, her mother, and her lover. They were cowards too, and it was worse because she loved them.
Marcella cleaned house that Wisconsin Walpurgisnacht; informing her gentle mother that this farmhouse was no place for a weak woman, that she was to get out until such a time as her father was strong enough to shelter a woman of her kind. Piet made no move to stop his daughter. As much as he loved his wife, he was in awe of the redheaded girl who bore his features.
Mai Hendenfelder DeVries left that night for the shelter of friends in Lake Geneva. Marcella had directions for Papa, too: he was not to tinker with his violin or play his Victrola or read until he exhausted himself in the fields each day like the cheap German immigrant labor he hired. Shamed and humiliated beyond words, Piet mutely agreed. Marcella raged on: he was to renounce God and Jesus Christ and the Dutch Reformed Church. Piet balked. Marcella raged. Piet continued to balk until Marcella said simply, with brutal finality—“If you don’t, you will never see Johnny or me again.”
Sobbing, abject, and utterly degraded, he agreed.
* * *
—
Will had not helped Marcella humiliate his father. Marcella considered this the ultimate betrayal.
They were through, of course, the golden elite were now just tarnished fragments; but that wasn’t enough for Marcella. She wanted further revenge—something that would solidify her contempt for the Berglund family and all of Tunnel City, Wisconsin.
Will and Marcella had exchanged love letters for years, explicit ones, full of references to lovemaking and dripping with contempt for the picayune small-town ways of Tunnel City. In those letters the genitalia of prominent townspeople were derided, Tunnel City High School teachers were excoriated as buffoons and Willem Berglund was satirized and dissected in vicious detail.
Marcella savored the letters her weakling lover had sent her. She considered her options and decided to wait before using them.
Small-town talk continued as Willem endeavored to drink himself to death; Piet worked side by side with his laborers, and Marcella and Will went to high school and never spoke to each other.
Marcella had a new cause: her brother, Johnny. Johnny, at fourteen, was six foot six, and blond like his mother. He was a wild but quiet boy who preferred the company of animals, often raiding the outdoor pantries of neighboring farmhouses to steal sides of beef and pork to feed to the legions of homeless dogs and cats who roamed the outskirts of town.
Marcella, now bereft of a lover, became the aimless giant’s benefactor, counselor, tutor, and anodyne. She held her brother fiercely close in the wake of her loss, and taught the bright but lazy boy subjects as diverse as geometry and poetry, medieval history and calculus. She awakened in him more than he knew he possessed, and by doing so reached deep for her best.
The new DeVries combine had a dream; a dream that expressed both Marcella’s elitist contempt and Johnny’s love for animals: medicine. Marcella the microbe hunter, the doctor who would go into “pure research,” and Johnny, the veterinarian who would surround himself with the love of strays and foundlings seeking to be healed. It was a powerful dream, one that would take them far from the hated confines of Tunnel City, Wisconsin. But first Marcella had to have her revenge on the town.
In June of 1928, at sixteen, she graduated from Tunnel City High School, the youngest member of her class. Piet was very proud. Mai, still estranged from her family, returned from Lake Geneva at Piet’s urgings to see the daughter she hated smile contemptuously in gown and mortarboard on the stage of the school auditorium as she was lauded in small-town hyperbole for her academic accomplishments. After the ceremony, Mai returned to Lake Geneva, never to see her family again.
Diploma in hand, Marcella went about her business. There were eighty-three letters from Will. On the Monday morning after her graduation, Marcella spent hours deciding where each letter should go to achieve the maximum insult and harm. This accomplished, she went on her mission. Main Street was first, where Marcella dropped little packets of vitriol with the mayor, town alderman, librarian, sheriff, barber, and every businessman on the four commercial blocks of Tunnel City.
“Read this,” she said to each recipient. “See if you recognize any of your friends.”
The churches were next: Dutch Reformed, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Baptist all received messages of hate tailored to offend at the level of both faith and viscera.
Marcella then traversed the residential streets of Tunnel City in a concise, well-mapped-out pattern until her brown paper bag was empty. Then she walked home and told her brother to pack his bag, that they would be leaving soon to pursue their dream.
Their departure was delayed. Marcella figured she would wait two days, to collect her thoughts and savor the first ripples of shocked reaction from the town before stealing her father’s cache of gems and heading for New York City with Johnny.
She holed up in her bedroom reading Baudelaire and thumbing through East Coast college catalogues. On Tuesday night she heard her father weeping in his bedroom. That meant that he knew.
Marcella decided to go for a last walk in the cabbage fields. She skipped down the dusty road that separated the DeVries and Berglund farms. Willem Berglund was waiting. He was stone cold sober and carrying a straight razor. He grabbed Marcella and threw her to the ground and raped her, the razor at her throat. After he finished he lay on top of her as she stared off into the sky, teeth clenched, refusing to make a sound. When he regained his breath, Willem stood up and urinated on Marcella’s prostrate form. Then he walked back into the darkness of his cabbage fields.
* * *
—
Marcella lay there for an hour, then hobbled home. She forced herself to cry. Her father was still awake, tinkering with his violin. Marcella told him what had happened, then turned and went to bed. Piet didn’t. He stayed up all night, playing the Beethoven symphonies in chronological order on his Victrola and executing the most difficult passages of the Kreutzer Sonata on his violin.
In the morning, while Marcella and Johnny were still asleep, Piet walked to the home of one of his farmhands and asked to borrow a 10-gauge double-barreled shotgun. Varmints, Piet said. The man gave his employer the gun and shells with his good wishes. Piet then walked to the Berglund farmhouse, the loaded shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. He knocked on his neighbor’s door. Willem answered immediately, as if expecting someone.
Piet stuck the shotgun into Willem’s chest and fired, ripping him apart at the level of the lower torso. The top half of Willem’s body flew back into his living room, while the lower half crumpled at Piet’s feet. Piet reloaded and stepped into the living room, gathering the two pieces of what had once been his friend into a pile next to the fireplace. He dipped his hand into Willem’s blood and smeared “God’s mercy on us” on the wall, then stuck the shotgun into his mouth and squeezed both triggers.
* * *
—
If it was more than she had bargained for she never told anyone, not even Will years later when they were reconciled and corresponded voluminously.
Marcella gathered up her brother and her father’s jewelry shortly aft
er dark on the night he died and headed south, on foot, toward Chicago. As they passed the far border of what were once the Berglund and DeVries cabbage farms, Marcella took an ax and smashed the connecting points of the irrigation sluices that fed water to the farmland. She didn’t know if this would flood the cabbage fields or render them dry as a bone, and she didn’t care; she only wanted the land on both sides of the dusty country road to suffer as she had.
They traveled southeast, by train and by bus. Marcella decided on a circuitous route, to give Johnny time to accept his father’s death. Although they were only sixteen and fourteen, no one bothered them; Marcella had the competent look of a woman in her twenties and Johnny was too big to be considered anything but an adult.
They arrived in New York City two weeks later. Marcella had half-expected a sheriff’s posse of Tunnel Cityites to follow them, but no one pursued. New York City sweltered in a summer heat wave, and Marcella sold the jewels and set about trying to register in premed at Columbia and New York universities. She was not accepted at either school, or at Brooklyn College, New York City College, or at the half dozen other schools she applied to.
There was a simple reason for this: Tunnel City High School would not forward her transcript, and she could not return to pick it up, lest she be held and placed in a home for wayward girls. Marcella thought about this. She had seven thousand three hundred dollars in a bank account, she had Johnny, and she had her will to succeed. She had a two-room flat near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and she had her brains.
Marcella decided that fate was on her side. She was right. On Independence Day, 1928, she went walking and passed the Fletcher School of Nursing on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. Next door to it was the Fletcher School of Pharmacology. Both schools were “fully accredited”—it said so right there above the door. Marcella had a feeling that this was her destiny, at least for the time being. She was right again.
Willard Fletcher took one look at the hard-eyed young redhead seated across the desk from him and knew that she could give him things his wife never could. He told Marcella this on their first night in bed together.
The admissions office was quiet that day as Marcella explained that her small-town high school had recently burned down and their records were destroyed in the fire. She was a straight-A student, as was her brother John, and she wanted to take the Fletcher School of Nursing’s three-year course before transferring to a prestigious university medical school. John eventually wanted to study veterinary medicine, but that was out of the question now. The Fletcher School of Pharmacology would serve as good pre-veterinary training, didn’t Mr. Fletcher agree?
Mr. Fletcher did indeed. He took Marcella’s registration fees, and she and Johnny were enrolled for the fall semester. It was that simple. Except, he explained, for the matter of her records. The schools had a reputation to uphold, and before the semester started he wanted to be sure that Marcella was bright and competent enough to tackle the curriculum. Perhaps if they got together socially he could gently quiz her on her academic background, get to know her better, and satisfy himself that she was up to Fletcher School of Nursing standards. Would that be possible? Marcella smiled in anticipation of playing the game.
“Of course,” she said.
Marcella played the game well. Her scholastic performance was so superior and her hold over Willard Fletcher so absolute that after three semesters of study she had convinced her benefactor-lover to forge complete academic records going back to the first grade at various secondary schools in the Bronx.
Her fake transcript in hand, she applied to the nursing school of New York University, where she was immediately accepted.
She continued to be the nominal mistress of Willard Fletcher until she was well established at N.Y.U. Then she dropped him like a hot rock, causing an awful scene in the banquet room of a large Atlantic City hotel where they were attending a convention of medical supply wholesalers.
Marcella took her nurse’s cap in June of 1931. Johnny was graduated from pharmacy school a year later, with scholastic honors and a codeine habit.
It was the height of the Depression, and their frugally spent money had run out. Marcella considered her options again: med school was out, for now. Money was too tight. She took a job at Bellevue Hospital, patching up derelicts brought to the emergency room. Johnny went to work in the hospital pharmacy, compounding the sedative mixtures used to knock the mental patients into harmless oblivion. He himself remained in a state of oblivion in his off-hours, only he wasn’t so harmless—the once-gentle giant, now almost seven feet tall, had become a fearsome barroom brawler. Marcella was continually bailing him out of jail and taking him home to their Brooklyn Heights apartment, where she would stroke his battered head as he whimpered for his dead father.
* * *
—
When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, Will Berglund was a twenty-nine-year-old English teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Marcella DeVries was the head nurse at a Catholic hospital on Staten Island, and Johnny DeVries was New York City’s leading supplier of illegal codeine.
War brought forth in these disparate individuals the same rush of patriotism that seized millions of other Americans. Will joined the army, received a commission, and was sent to the Pacific. His career as a soldier ended quickly: he caught mortar fire in both lower legs and was repatriated to the naval hospital at San Diego, California, where he underwent several operations and extensive therapy to restore his shattered nerve tissue.
It was there, in the hospital, that he was reunited with Marcella, now a thirty-year-old Wave lieutenant. The events of the previous fifteen years were shunted aside. Will loved Marcella as fiercely now, in her white uniform, as he had when she wore the gingham dresses of her childhood. Time and place and the necessity of healing obliterated the familial bloodletting of Tunnel City, and Marcella and Will again became lovers; the changing of bandages and emptying of bedpans metamorphosed into a late night love ritual that cleansed and healed them both. For the first time in their lives, their mutual small-town ghost was consigned to oblivion.
Johnny DeVries rounded out the San Diego triumvirate. A pharmacist’s mate second-class assigned to the hospital pharmacy, he dispatched palliative compounds to the ships moored at the San Diego Naval Yard and moonlighted by running marijuana over the border from Tijuana. Johnny had modified his drug use, switching from codeine to reefer, and his violent behavior modified along with it. The seven-foot brawler was now content to spend his evenings in the Coronado Bay apartment he shared with Marcella and Will.
Marcella and Will would talk, and Will would gamely trundle across the living room to strengthen his now brace-clad legs, and Johnny would smoke hop in his bedroom and listen to Glenn Miller records.
The happy trio stayed together until the spring of 1943, when Marcella met the man who was to shatter her illusions and her life.
“When he walked and spoke, you knew that he knew; that he understood all of life’s dark secrets—on the level of animal instinct—some highly attuned animal superior to man,” Marcella wrote to Will years later. “He is the handsomest man I have ever seen; and he knows it and knows that you know it—and he respects you for your supreme good taste and treats you as an equal for wanting to know what it is he knows.”
Marcella’s infatuation and curiosity took flight, and three days after meeting Doc Harris, she announced to Will: “I cannot be with you. I have met a man I want to the exclusion of all else.” It was brutally final. Will, who had known that Marcella would ultimately have to move on, accepted it. He moved out of the apartment and back to the hospital. He received his medical discharge a week later and returned to Wisconsin.
Doc Harris was a genius, Marcella decided. He could think two steps ahead of her, and of course she bordered on genius herself. He spoke five languages to her three, he knew more about medicine than she did, he could dri
nk her under the table and never show it, he could dance like Gene Kelly, and at forty-five could do a hundred one-handed push-ups. He was a god. He had won twenty-nine fights as a professional light heavyweight during the Jack Dempsey era, he could lampoon small-town mores better than she and Will at their best, and he could cook Chinese food.
And he was enigmatic, willfully so: “I’m a walking euphemism,” he told Marcella. “When I tell you I run a chauffeur service, it may or may not be the literal truth. When I tell you I use my medical background to benefit man, look for the riddle. When you wonder at my connections to the big brass here in Dago, wonder at what I can do for them that they can’t do for themselves.”
Marcella’s mind ran with many possibilities regarding her new lover: he was a gangster, a high-ranking navy deserter, a remittance man devoted to a life of anonymous good. No explanation satisfied her, and she constantly thought about the literal truths she knew regarding this man who had taken over her life. She knew that he had been born near Chicago in 1898, that he had attended public schools there; that he had been a hero in World War I. She knew that he had never married because he had never found a woman to match the force of his personality. She knew that he had plenty of money but never worked. She knew that he had worked at odd jobs, gaining life experience after leaving med school at the beginning of the Depression. She knew that his small beachfront apartment was filled with the books she herself had read and loved. And she knew that she loved him.
* * *
—
One night in the summer of 1943 the lovers went walking on the beach near San Diego. Doc told Marcella that he was resettling in the Los Angeles area; that he had the “opportunity of a lifetime” there. His only regret, he said, was that they would have to part. Temporarily, of course—he would come down to Dago to visit. He wanted to be with her every spare moment; she was the only woman who had come close to touching the core of his heart.
