by Molly Brodak
The story makes things easier for us: solves a mystery, the problem of why. And maybe to call an act “out of character” is to reveal oneself: how limited any one person’s knowledge is of any other person. Some people’s wall of privacy is quite opaque, but that doesn’t mean what’s behind it is not part of them. No, the “out-of-character” story is just a barren and cartoonish way of thinking about character.
I moved across the aisle to the poetry section and set my fingers on the oldest-looking book on the shelf. Leaves of Grass. I pulled it down and opened to the center of the book:
And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.
I snapped the book shut as if I’d seen something in it move. My life turned on a pivot point when I read these lines from the end of “To a Certain Civilian.” It seemed like poetry itself speaking to me in those lines, challenging me to come to new ground. I didn’t turn back to the fiction section that year. Poetry became my companion, starting with Whitman, then Dickinson, then the rest of that small section. It seemed to know a better way to the world—an approach more honest, more direct, sharper.
I enfolded a deep mistrust of stories into my being that year. It was personal. It was, in a way I didn’t know yet, political. I mean I saw this story on the news, this same story about my dad that my family and friends were telling themselves.
I watched the story spill forth. From the inner state of my particular sister and mom and grandparents came a certain story about Dad to soothe themselves with, then the story made its way outward, to the cops, the FBI, the reporters. I saw how a public narrative starts with one person—my sister, for example, thinking, talking, grasping for old stories to lay atop new ones; then reinforcement occurs, corners are cut, subtlety lost, and the story becomes history: a story that doesn’t cultivate contemplation but preempts it, ends it, like a coarse mask.
I laughed about it with my friends—Lindsey and Lauren, and my best friend Noah. They watched me carefully and wanted to know how they could help, but I offered nothing, and they gave up their concern eventually. I started to know then what I know now: why is a hard question. Sometimes it’s the wrong question to try to work out.
Still, I’ve tried working on why ever since. I dug up old court records from his first trial, looking for transcripts, for things he said on record that could explain his actions. I wasn’t surprised when I came across his lawyer’s sentencing memo from the trial, in which he used this exact reasoning in asking for lighter sentencing from the judge: “This is one of those rare cases where an individual who would otherwise be the last person you would suspect of threatening harm to others, did something completely out of character for reasons that are hard to fathom.”
The reasons weren’t that hard to fathom. He wanted to keep going. What everyone wants. I felt certain I didn’t know him, but I knew there was a lot I couldn’t see. Or, I should say, I knew there was a darkness. I was around his darkness. I was as close to it as a child could be to her father’s darkness without seeing it.
I carried on with West Middle School, keeping quiet, reading poetry. Others had it worse, I knew, much worse. Therapists have told me it is not productive to compare trauma and rate its value as “worse” or “better” than other trauma, but I am just being practical. I was not raped or starved or maimed, just ignored, and I lived OK in that empty space. I can come up with lots of reasons to make it OK.
My mom and I took my sister back to their condo to get more of her belongings. Over the next few weeks we’d go back there to take things to keep or sell. When we first arrived the FBI had just sacked the place again looking for the money or evidence. The money was all gone, though, paid to his debtors, spent on overdue bills, or wasted. Eleven banks, and all together he’d stolen only about $44,000.
It seemed like the FBI had cut open everything possible: the couches, pillows, mattresses, suitcases, boxes of food, bags of whatever, all of her stuffed animals. Photo albums were flung open in a pile on the kitchen table. All of my sister’s clothes were thrown from her closet and drawers into the center of her room. His room was worse. Nothing was OK. The white stuffing from his comforter had been pulled out like guts. It was awful for my sister, to see her home ripped open in every way, all for money. It seemed cruel, weirdly vengeful, although it probably wasn’t. I felt guilty for not being her. I felt sick that I lived with Mom instead of Dad and this didn’t happen to me. It did happen to me—but I was on the farther side of things. I hated that about myself.
She packed up her clothes and things of hers that weren’t destroyed. She cried, the destroyed one, plucking framed photos of her and Dad together from the wall and hugging them like a war widow. Most of the rest of the stuff would be thrown out. The only things I took were a cheap record player and his Italian opera records. I also took what I thought were blank cassettes, but later I discovered they were full of recordings from the radio or CDs he liked. One had the Simply Red version of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” recorded over and over, back-to-back, the entire tape.
33
They let my sister keep the Firebird because, she argued to the FBI, he owed her money. They couldn’t exactly trace the car to stolen money anyway. She kept the Firebird all through high school until she got into a fight with some girl over a boy, and the car’s paint job ended up disfigured after being dotted with bologna in the school parking lot. She sold it for almost nothing.
She stayed with our grandparents for a few weeks, then came to stay with us. For the one year we went to the same high school—her as a senior and me as a freshman—she’d sometimes drive me to school in that car. At 7:15 a.m. I’d squash myself into the backseat and push my nose into my coat sleeve or cardigan or whatever I had to filter the overpowering stink of shitty perfume she’d just doused her entire upper body in moments before plopping into the driver’s seat, barely awake, sometimes hungover. In the cold dark mornings I’d go with her like that, my whole chest vibrating from the dumb bass of 2 Live Crew chanting “pop that pussy” or “put your back into it” while I tried to cover myself from all of it, especially her, her like this. Mostly I walked to school.
My sister moved in with us on a Sunday and the FBI came to see her the next day. I remember letting them in. It was sunny and warm and the two men filled the door completely with darkness. Mom led them to the kitchen table, where my sister was waiting for the interview, this same kitchen where Dad had sent a singing gorilla just a few months before. Not needed, I sat secretly on the steps to listen. “Do you recognize the man in this photo?” one of them began.
“Yeah that’s my Uncle Mike.” My sister’s voice was icy.
“Your Uncle Mike has been coming around a lot lately, hasn’t he?”
“No.”
“You saw him visiting your dad a lot last week, didn’t you? Answer calls from him too?”
“Um no, not at all.”
“Do you recognize the man in this photo?”
“No.”
It was an army buddy Dad knew in Vietnam. They showed her a yellowy photo of them in fatigues, smoking, clasped to each other over a machine gun on a tripod as if the three of them were posing for a family portrait. Mom watched the interviewers and my sister with concern.
“And this man here, next to your dad, you recognize him, don’t you?”
“I already told you, that is Uncle Mike,” she said, angry now.
“And here?”
“I. Don’t. Know.” She was muffling tears. They kept asking her over and over to identify either Uncle Mike or the war buddy, or sometimes Dad in surveillance video stills. Mom was getting agitated too.
“OK, that’s enough. She doesn’t know anything, for Christ’s sake, she wasn’t there,” Mom interrupted. “She’s just a child.”
Dad told the investigators he’d been framed, that it was either this old war buddy or his brother who’d done the robberies, not him. He blamed his
own brother. There was the money in his car, the disguise, the security camera photos of him coming and going from the banks, his face clear as day. Framed. Nothing much came of this claim, ultimately, except a couple of hour-long FBI interviews my sister pressed herself through.
Our first trip back to Dad’s condo Mom saw a fake ID he was making on his desk, the materials laid out plainly, almost comically obvious: an X-Acto knife, a new name, another photo. He must have been planning to take off. There is no return to a normal life after a crime spree, is there? I can’t imagine he thought he could just quit robbing and go back to a real job, back to normal. I also don’t know why he didn’t split sooner. He could’ve brought my sister to us, to get her out of the way at least. He could’ve taken his money and moved away, to start over as a new man. But he just came home, kept coming home after the robberies, pretending everything was normal. Perhaps he was hesitating, or waiting to save up more money. Maybe he didn’t want to leave my sister. Or he was lazy, or scared.
I didn’t go to any of the trial or court appearances with my mom and sister. I never saw him at all during that time. The news covered the story, and I’d see photos of him in the paper or the court sketches on the local news. Dad’s face looked sour, saggy. I threw myself harder into school and tried to forget the mess. I wanted to become a chemist. I loved the formulas and codes. It seemed grand and safe, things to know, plain and tidy and logical.
I could forget. I forgot.
There seemed to be nothing to gain from thinking about it. I couldn’t help him, or my sister, or myself, by thinking about it, so I turned away.
The local media continued to cover the drawn-out trials, dragged out by Dad’s insistence on a psychological evaluation, then rounds of firing his lawyers. It would pop up sometimes on the news or in newspapers. My sister followed them more closely.
He wanted to plead insanity, claim that the trauma from PTSD caused his actions, which he described as out-of-body experiences, with no memory of them. His first lawyer was fired for strongly urging him not to take this course of action. After all, he had kept a neat list of the robberies, which was in his wallet when he was arrested, noting the time, date, and amount of money procured from each one. Not exactly consistent with an “out-of-body experience.”
After long delays, constant objections, and legal stalling, he was evaluated by a court psychiatrist, deemed competent, and had to drop his insanity defense. He was sentenced to ten years for felony bank robbery, but would serve only seven with good behavior.
He never gave in. Never admitted his crimes, never apologized. Not publicly nor privately, not to anyone. His story of being framed dropped away, as did the story of the amnesia and war trauma, until there was just silence, just him there with his crimes, with no stories to explain them, just silence.
34
When Dad was arrested I had been camping grumpily with Mom, but afterward, everything was different. Suddenly I liked camping. I wanted to go every chance I could. With Mom, with boyfriends, alone sometimes. It was Mom’s coping mechanism, and I took it up too. As a teenager, I rode my bike across the top half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, alone, sleeping in cheap campgrounds and stopping in small towns to eat. I just wanted the air to push clear through me across farmland and mines of old glacial plains, land that was still rising, bouncing back a few centimeters every year from the pressure of long-gone ice sheets six thousand feet high. Gentle moraines ended in dunes on Lake Michigan, which I reached in a week, then unceremoniously turned to circle back.
Having stopped on a very empty stretch for a drink and a rest, I watched a pickup truck slow on the shoulder in front of me and stop. I felt a sick cringe in my gut. Not a person or house for miles. The door popped open and I climbed onto my bike. A man with dead eyes, in overalls and a trucker hat, moved toward me with some mumbled questions: “You OK out here … you need a lift? I’ll putcher bike in the back …” I was already pushing off on my heavily loaded bike. I passed him wide but still he made a weird grab for my arm. With no weapon, I’d thought to at least pull my camera out and snap a photo of his license plate, just to scare him, I guess. He didn’t follow me.
It was robustly unsafe alone out there, but I didn’t think about it. I loved the Great Lakes and I wanted to be near them. Their spans were calmer and colder than the ocean, fresh-feeling, but dizzyingly wide against the horizon. Unlike anywhere else in the world. Lake Superior was my favorite: deep and clear down to the rocks, too cold to grow the regular lake muck I’d felt in the smaller interior lakes dotting Michigan, chilly a few steps out of the shallows, even in summer. Shipwrecks and petrified forests were preserved below. You could just look down and see them in the deep, still as tombs. Michigan was my body, surrounded by small, secret oceans that pulled on me, from the inside out.
On that bike trip I camped illegally on a small cove on Huron’s shore, a plot in the middle of nowhere, circled by thick pines. There was nothing to do those nights, and I loved it. Before dark I’d lie on the dune grass and watch the pine tops sway in the darkening patch of sky. I would lie still for so long. I imagined my body collapsing, sinking in, the grass creeping over, these tall trees pinioning it, the rusty needle bed that’d blanket me, the leathery dead cottonwood leaves in drifts, then snow pack, the particular blue hush of it in northern pine stands, the mud of a bog encroaching, my body thinning its parts and trickling down, lake water washing its particles out, down among billion-year-old minerals, into the compressed coals of ancient plants, ancient places, down to the basalt, where it belongs, part of the dirt and sand, safe, in an honest home; how happy that made me to imagine.
35
The intensity of the event faded and Dad faded in my life. I let him fade. For my sister, his presence seemed to become even more intense, now disembodied, like a ghost following her everywhere, reaching her through letters and phone calls. He tried to parent her through his letters; I found some of them in the basement of my sister’s house when I was looking for the scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings she’d kept. “It’s all yours,” she said, gesturing to the basement, when I had asked her if I could look at any “Dad stuff” she had kept. “But, I don’t want to talk about it.” The scrapbooks were gone but manila folders full of his letters had been kept alongside bank statements in her filing cabinets.
In the letters it’s clear that her behavior was wild now; she was a party girl, checked out at school, dating a trashy older guy who was into drag racing. Dad hated this guy and tried, in his letters, to forbid her from seeing him. Most of the letters admonished her for the trouble she was getting herself into, which she must have been confessing to in her letters to him, oddly. She was being honest with him about her life at a time when she didn’t have to be. She moved in with her scuzzy boyfriend, for a while at least, until he started hitting her and stealing from her. It was that story anyone would expect—an insecure girl acting out at her daddy, exactly that. Dad threatened her with all he had left: their relationship. He told her he’d never speak to her again unless she did what he wanted.
It went on like this for years. Invisible, he loomed huge in her life; he was all around her, emotionally, psychologically.
Toward the end of his term, my sister started to straighten up. She was hyperaware of his impending release and prepared for it, I think, with honest hope and incredible forgiveness. He is instructive in his letters, involved, advising my sister to transfer from a community college to the local university, telling her to take out student loans he promises to pay back when he gets out, instructing her on how to cheat on her taxes. My sister must have asked him about some family history, because in a few of the letters he gives a very different account of our parents’ marriage. I know not to believe his version. But after all this time it is sort of nice just to hear him address it at all, the irony of his attitude toward our mom, surely, unfathomably, lost on him. He wrote:
I’m glad you had a heart-to-heart with your mother. The way I see it, as a wife your m
other betrayed me (by sleeping with other men) and, more recently, as a friend she rejected me. I discarded the letter she wrote me otherwise I would send it to you and you could see in black and white where she tells me that she will have nothing to do with me. My “friend” betrayed me by breaking off our relationship.
You see, during these past five year, the word TRUST has taken on a new meaning for me. I know exactly who I can trust and all the other people I know mean nothing to me. You, the most important person in the world to me, and my sister Helen are the only ones I can trust. Thus, I must say that because your mother is a cheap whore I will never love her again. And, because your mother is self-centered and interminably dishonorable, I can never again be her friend.
Since you brought out some of the family past, I feel I must provide some of the facts from my perspective. First of all, I did have a gambling problem. I couldn’t stay away from sports betting. I won a lot of money and I lost a lot of money. However, you were all the most important considerations in my life. Your mother didn’t see it that way—she, in effect, was looking for an excuse to get out of a marriage that she felt trapped in. Be aware it was SHE who cheated on ME.
So you’ll be living with her again. Please respect your biological relationship and remember this: you can never expect the real truth from her. She is a weak, untrustworthy person. Your mother is unable to teach you what true love is all about.
All of that aside, you really made my day on Father’s Day. I started to feel low about it, but you came through and made me feel great. Your large envelope arrived yesterday and I would like to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all the wonderful surprises. Your greeting card brought tears to my eyes—I know you chose the words that were printed on it and all of them are greatly appreciated. The blown up, personalized photo is a terrific memento that I’ll cherish forever and the copy of your report card couldn’t have brought better news.
