“She was,” I said.
“And if you’ll forgive me for thinking out loud like this,” said the consul, “but I’ve served in Guatemala for some time now, and maybe, Mr. Graetz, Roger, some of what I have to say can be helpful to you.”
He went on: Guatemala, three decades of war, the overall effects of that, a pretty lawless place where all sorts of ordinarily questionable acts might seem justified by practical necessity—
“And someone like Flor,” he said, “working with victims all the time, might be especially vulnerable in just this way. Because let’s face it, orphans, abandoned and displaced children, war refugees, never mind just plain poor children, don’t ordinarily have much of a future here. Many people overseas want children. But the paperwork, even in an otherwise legal adoption, can move very, very slowly, so there must be quite a bit of corruption in that process by now, to expedite it, get it moving faster. And so you can get into all kinds of gray areas, as far as motivations and justifications are concerned. Flor was an orphan herself, and she certainly benefited from getting out of Guatemala; it’s not hard to see why she might have wanted to do the same for others, no matter what that took . . . Well, I’m not a psychologist or ethical philosopher or anything like that.
“But my wife and I, we did admire Flor. We saw her on social occasions. For so long, we just didn’t believe a thing of what we sometimes heard—I’m not saying that we do now. But no matter what else, Mr. Graetz, Roger, Flor accomplished good things here. Kids, dozens, hundreds, owe their lives to her. People brought her children all the time, some of them really at death’s door, the severely malnourished ones, and she always took them right in no matter how hopeless their condition. That had to be tough. And even the ones who survived, so many of them have lived through horrors. But maybe that’s where Flor was especially effective, with kids like that. I remember the day that Sue, my wife, came back from visiting Flor at Los Quetzalitos, where she’d gotten the whole tour. What Sue said was that Flor was just a natural empathizer. If you spoke to some of the others who work with children in this country, they’d still say Flor was pretty exemplary—creative, imaginative. The way she got really ill children treated abroad for free for example. That was unprecedented here.”
“It was,” said my father, tears brimming in his eyes now. “She was very excited when she began that program, I remember that, Consul.”
And then we all fell silent again. The consul’s speech had been too much for me to take in all at once, in all its seeming implications, though just trying to follow it had, for a while, detached me from my own devastation, had made me listen almost as if to the interesting case history of someone I didn’t know. But now that the consul was done, the final fact of her death had flooded back, that horrendously heavy flood. I did feel convinced that something had gone terribly wrong with Flor, that she was “guilty” of something—but that conviction felt as far away, as irrelevant yet as unavoidable as the clear tropical sky in the office window, the same color, almost, as Consul Simms’s watery eyes.
Suddenly my father, with something fierce and final in his voice, blasted us from our ruminations: “Well I am surprised, I’m damned surprised, Consul!”
“. . . I’m sure you are, Mr. Graetz,” said Consul Simms, quickly recovering his professional tone, but betraying, I thought, just a bit of weariness now.
“She’s not like that,” said my father—speaking of you then as his daughter, though he never actually adopted you, as his very own and only, thoroughly known only to him, daughter. “This is a girl, Consul Simms”—A girl! You were thirty-three!—“who always had her head on straight. Who knew right from wrong, a very moral, thoughtful, wonderful girl. Educated at one of the very best colleges. She started out in this life with everything going against her and she made it into the elite, but, oh, modest as can be, so down to earth. I never saw her treat anybody badly, not gratuitously, ever! Never saw an ounce of cruelty in her. Everyone who came in contact with her, her teachers, her professors, knew this about her.”
I knew her differently, of course, than a professor or even a parent could know her, but there still was some bit of truth in what my father was saying.
“So I’m sure you did like and admire Flor, Consul, and I would have been very surprised to hear that you did not. But I have to—no disrespect intended, believe me—I have to wonder if you really did know her well, to be able to imply even the possibility of such things about her.”
“Well, I didn’t know her all that well, Mr. Graetz,” said the consul. “I didn’t mean to give that impression, or that I absolutely do know what happened. Of course I don’t.”
But there was no stopping my father now, and he went on in the terrible cadences of a blue-collar Boston rabbi wronged by heaven.
“You have been very straightforward with us, Consul. I appreciate that. You have made my son and me feel your concern. I feel reassured to know that there are young men of your qualities in our diplomatic corps, I honestly do. And as I go along weighing the evidence in this case, I will consider, strongly and openly, what you’ve said to us here today, and I know that you will be a happy man when this is finally all cleared up. Because, rumors or motivations or whatever, I just cannot believe a word of it.”
My poor father—there wasn’t going to be any contradictory evidence to weigh, all we were going to do was talk to a few more people whose testimonies were going to be no more comforting, and then go home.
“I, and I think many people here, would be very moved, Mr. Graetz, if Flor were to be completely exonerated,” said Consul Simms. “And I appreciate your kind words. They’re important to me.”
“Call it a gut hunch if you want,” said my father. “But I did some police work myself once, long ago, back when I was in the service. And two of my brothers have been district attorneys in Boston, and one is now a judge. And I will tell you this, no one who knows about police work will disregard a gut hunch just like that, no matter what the evidence to the contrary looks like. In a courtroom you learn that the truth does ring true.”
And my father pronounced these last words almost in the tone of blessing and benediction. And I could see, as he sat back in the couch now, one arm hoisted up over the armrest, that it really was as if he’d established her innocence to himself and felt relieved to have done so. He was getting ready to fight that good fight on Flor’s behalf—the fight he wasn’t even going to get a chance at.
“Now,” said Consul Simms, “we’ve received a number of inquiries from Guatemala City funeral homes, addressed to you. You’re not planning a funeral here, are you? Or any kind of service? I, frankly, wouldn’t recommend it, Mr. Graetz, circumstances being what they are.”
“No,” said my father. “We will take her home with us, Consul.”
“I see, then—”
“But we’d like to set something up so that donations can be sent in her memory to . . . well, to the orphanage. Maybe you can advise me. How could I let that be known down here?”
“Through the newspapers, Mr. Graetz, for one . . . Did she belong to any one church in Guatemala, do you know?”
“No I, ah, don’t. Roger, do you?”
“I guess you’d have to call her a lapsed Catholic,” I said. “Even though she used to go to church sometimes, but that was mainly to take her orphans there.”
“There is an organization here called Republicans Abroad,” said the consul. “They put out a newsletter that’s widely distributed among the American community here. That would be a place to mention it.”
“No ... a Republican paper, did you say? No, something attached to the Republican party like that, no offense intended, Consul, but it just wouldn’t be appropriate. She had strong—Flor would not have wanted that.”
“Well, it isn’t . . . Republicans Abroad does fund it, Mr. Graetz, but it really is just a community newsletter, not much more than that,” said Consul Simms, maintaining an unruffled demeanor. “It isn’t ideological, really. It’s give
n out for free in American-owned restaurants, places like that. If you have a car to sell or . . . It’s useful for what you have in mind, Mr. Graetz, that’s all I mean.”
“To be truthful . . . ,” said my father, looking a bit confused now. “—We’ll talk it over, my son and I . . . Maybe we should look at a copy.”
“Isn’t there a Democrats Abroad?” I asked, in as normal a tone as I could manage.
“No,” said Consul Simms, and for the briefest moment, I thought, he wanted to smile. “No, there really isn’t anything like that in Guatemala.”
Oh well, let’s not forget Democrat too, a word that means something, probably quite a bit too much nowadays, to people like my father, raised in the working-class, immigrant wards of Boston. Flor became the daughter of a Depression-era, FDR-era immigrant’s son who always votes Kennedy “because with a Kennedy at least you always know what you’re getting, just look at their voting records!” There’s such a thing as Men of Harvard too and my father is one, though he never actually got to go there. Flor and I were raised in the shadows of such idealizations—Harvard, the Kennedys even (not to mention the Empire of my mother’s Nostalgia, a whole other fairy tale), in the saturating fairy-tale shadows of this tangible yet hard to espouse sense of . . . the thirties and forties, of the Depression and the War ... of what good character and good education and good politics meant, or were supposed to have meant, to my father, his brothers, and their circle of lifelong pals—none more devout later on than my father when it came to taking his son and Straight-A Guatemalan “daughter” to Harvard Stadium on Saturdays and on weekend pedagogical trips all over the Northeast to watch the Harvard football team. And those trips did influence his children’s lives, perhaps even more so than they would have had he actually gone to Harvard.
My father always had it a little tougher than his brothers and friends, and I guess they all thought of him as the one who’d had the least luck. Because Harvard really had wanted him once. He was invited to a spring banquet honoring Boston’s top schoolboy athletes and encouraged to apply. But, for one thing, there was always the problem of his own father, who’d fled the czar way back when in order to realize the American Dream of becoming head of the Dorchester Jewish Socialist Bakers’ Union, working as a baker a hundred hours a week and dreaming of a return to Soviet Russia—now there’s a dream within a dream—and who just didn’t understand things like Harvard and sports. The family was always moving from one ramshackle dwelling to the next, but my father and his brothers always found a place where they could hide their athletic gear before coming indoors. Apparently my father’s father was so fanatically thrifty that, no matter what the family’s actual financial situation at the time, all the guy needed was to hear of a cheaper apartment, even—it is now probably exaggeratedly claimed—just a couple of dimes a month cheaper, and he’d move his wife and six kids and his barrels of souring pickles and green tomatoes and so on into that cheaper place in about two seconds flat. It was as if he conceived the American saying of a penny saved being a penny earned as being as indisputable as a czarist decree.
“Your father’s father’s idea of upward mobility was to keep moving down down downward,” my mother used to say, fed up with a decade of still living on Codrioli Road. “Now does that make any sense? No wonder we are not going anywhere. Your father feels just fine having stopped the slide.” But he hardly ever felt just fine. Money worries could make my father pace the house late at night like a wounded, groaning bear.
With the Depression at its peak, when my father could have gone to Harvard, he had five younger siblings to support. And though he did manage to squeeze in a staggered education at Boston University between his employments—“where once,” Flor, here, might have felt compelled to add, “Ira walked onto a track meet that Harvard runners were in too, and he won the 440 race going away in his street clothes!” And he was damned lucky to have found that traveling salesman’s job. The company provided him with a car, and he sold key-making machines throughout the Northeast, and was even based out of New York City for a while, where he lived in a rooming house at the edge of Times Square. I don’t know what my father was actually planning, or thought was actually happening to him during those years. He acts as if he has forgotten them—there is only the implicit and terrible lesson of an unfulfilled, thwarted youth. But who’s to say that he wasn’t blind to that then, that he wasn’t having a swell enough time? I think he might have been a bit more reckless and, in his own way, stylishly self-regarding during those years than he ever wanted me, or Flor, to believe.
Because when the War came my father, nearly thirty, enlisted in the army, and served as an M.P. detective with the rank of lieutenant. Only he didn’t get to go to Europe like his youngest brother, Herbert, who was in the Normandy Invasion and fought his way to Paris in the Shrub Wars, but was stationed at a base in the Deep South, where he lived the most adventurous, heroic, and bizarre episode of his life, one that seems all the more mysterious for the fact that he really went looking for it. It’s no surprise that he doesn’t like to talk about that much either. But the rest of his family and old pals certainly do. In fact, I can only recall hearing him tell this story from beginning to end once, the day of Aunt Beth’s funeral almost ten years ago, when his cousin Maxie coaxed it out of him:
The story of Dad hunting the perverted Cracker Colonel through the bayou, and facing him off at gunpoint in a redneck bar. Colonel Culgin had fought heroically in the South Pacific, but when he came home it was with a twelve-year-old Oriental girl that he kept as some kind of sex slave in a cabin hidden somewhere. Other officers at the base would speculatively talk about it because Colonel Culgin, drunk, had himself once, but no one had any idea where the cabin was, or any proof that it actually existed. Everyone did know that the colonel, an unmarried man, left the base nightly in his private car and then was not seen at any of the drinking spots around there. And my father began to investigate this. He didn’t try to hide it, he let it be known that he was investigating, asking questions around the base and even confronting the colonel himself more than one time. But the colonel was arrogant and just laughed in his face, and my father began to feel that he was having the first of his detective’s gut hunches. For one thing, he thought the guy just smelled like a pervert, that is, he gave off a smell that was both sweet and sour: “like cabbage soup,” said my father, “mixed with baby powder or something like that.”
Gut hunch or no, my father must have been possessed of some angry, righteous, or glory-seeking high spirits back then to have pursued this case the way he did. Because he began getting threats—from Colonel Culgin’s friends, anonymous threats, threats from the base’s secret chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. His investigation of the colonel and then its aftermath aroused a good deal of anti-Semitic indignation, it seems. Many of my father’s friends at the base advised him that it was probably a good idea to just lay off. But these threats, by their nature and vitriol, had convinced him of the colonel’s probable guilt. He could have just let the colonel, who might have become psychologically imbalanced by the horrors of a war my father hadn’t himself experienced, alone with his one little POW. Instead he decided that Colonel Culgin represented the enemy at home.
He finally tracked him to a roadside bar in a remote town, which he guessed must be the same town that the cabin was in. And he went into the bar and found the colonel drinking with some locals. And he told the colonel—And here, the one time I heard my father tell it, saw him act it out, he did seem to travel back in time, becoming someone I’d never seen before: his whole face seemed to tighten and pale with a street fighter’s methodical rage, he cocked his head and sneered his upper lip and, his Boston accent suddenly thicker than Tip O’Neill’s (and it is always pretty thick), he barked, he rhythmically barked, “Colonel, you know what I’m here for. So why don’t you just step outside with me right now and tell me about it, because I’m going to find out anyway.” This Hollywood stuff, my father! And Colonel Culgin said (and he
re my father did not even attempt to imitate a southern accent), “Listen, Yid, you no good Yid. You must know you ain’t gonna live through this. I could blow your Yid head off right here and who’d ever know or say.”
And then some of the rednecks had their pistols out, but my father had his out just as fast, had it pointed at the colonel’s heart, and just like that he backed out of the bar and got in his car and drove away. But not too far away, taking advantage of the time he had left as an unknown in that town to ask around. A steamy, unlit, swampy, venomous southern town of the sort I have never been to and am not sorry to have missed. It was at a closed general store with a gasoline pump out front that he found a young Negro man who would tell. The Negro had a terrible stutter, he was almost unintelligible, but he mapped out the way to the cabin by drawing with his finger on the grime-coated gas pump.
A couple of days later my father went back to that town, parked his car in a place it might not be noticed, and found the cabin in the swamp. The blinds were down over the windows and there was a common padlock over the front door. My father knocked, called “Hello? Hello?” and the ensuing silence filled him with a certainty even stronger than a hunch. He hid outside in the trees, enduring the bugs and rationing out the three cigarettes he had left over several hours. Colonel Culgin arrived at the cabin on foot, carrying a little bag of groceries. When the colonel put his key in the padlock and turned it, my father drew his pistol and crept up behind him. The colonel spun around, froze. My father disarmed him and then pushed the door open with his foot. Inside he saw the Oriental girl sitting on a stool at a table by a small shaded lamp. She was wearing a yellow dress and was looking at rather than reading—since the subsequent trial revealed that she spoke only a few words of English—a Babar the Elephant book.
It caused an ugly uproar. Local newspapers and many soldiers at the base were outraged by this northern Jew who was not even a war veteran who was trying to ruin the career and reputation of a lonely Southern War Hero just for illegally keeping a “war orphan” at home—in a cabin that wasn’t actually his home, out in the bayou. There was a court-martial. The Oriental girl wouldn’t speak, then finally did. And then she recanted and ceased to speak. The army had to provide my father with armed protection. Though the trial was inconclusive, Colonel Culgin was found guilty of violating immigration laws, and discharged. The girl was taken in by nuns in New Orleans. And my father was transferred to what amounted to a security guard’s job at an armaments plant in Delaware.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 9
