Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (2 page)

Perry Hilderly had been one of
the founders of the Free Speech Movement at U.C. Berkeley in the 1960s.
Although I'd still been in high school then, I'd taken a great interest
in the changing mood on the campuses—probably because I was the white
sheep in a family of rebels and envied both my siblings' and the
students' ability to blatantly challenge authority. My impressions of
Hilderly were somewhat vague, but I recalled television coverage of the
protests in which he could be seen clowning around on the periphery.

Hank said, "Do you remember him?"

"Some."

"I'm surprised."

I sat down at the kitchen table
with him. "Why?"

"Well, you were just a baby then."

I smiled. Hank is only six years
older than I, but he has always taken a paternalistic stance toward me.
Partly this is because when we met at Berkeley—years after Hilderly had
passed from that scene—he was a world-weary law student with the
horrors of Vietnam behind him, while I was an undergrad whose toughest
battles
had been fought in the trenches of the department store where I'd
worked in security before deciding to go to college. Over the years the
balance of world-weariness has shifted more to my side, but Hank
persists in the notion that he must watch out for and guide me. I know,
although we've never discussed it, that this persistence is fueled by
the fact that our friendship has never been endangered by romantic
entanglement. Hank's paternalism is designed to preserve the status quo.

"Still, I remember him," I said,
"even if he never received as much media attention as Mario Savio."

"Well, few people had Mario's
charisma. Perry's comedic style was a bit like Abbie Hoffman's, but not
nearly as outrageous. And there were a lot of lesser luminaries hogging
the limelight." Hank's smile was reminiscently wry.

I knew what he was thinking; as a
friend of mine once put it, not many of the sixties people have "held
up." Few went on to achieve the heights that those on the sidelines
expected of them. But for a time such visionaries as Mario Savio had
captured the imagination of a generation. Mario, who one fall day in
1964 respectfully removed his shoes before climbing atop a police car
that had been entrapped by some three thousand students protesting the
arrest of a civil-rights worker on the Cal campus. Mario, who seized a
microphone and involved others in the crowd in a thirty-hour
spontaneous public dialog that forever changed the university, the
youth of America, the nation itself. No, Perry Hilderly hadn't held a
safety match to Mario Savio's incandescence, but he had brought humor
to a basically humorless movement, had defused potentially dangerous
situations with his wit.

As I recalled, in the late
sixties Hilderly had vanished from the Berkeley scene. By the time I
arrived there, most of his compatriots had disappeared, too. I'd once
listened to a news analyst on KPFA discussing how many of the former
leaders of the FSM had become frustrated by their lack of tangible
progress and gone
underground with the Weathermen. Now it seemed that Hilderly, at least,
had become an accountant—and died many years later in a senseless
street shooting on Geary Boulevard, two blocks from his apartment.

I said to Hank, "You were still
an undergrad at Stanford in the sixties. How come you knew Hilderly? Or
did that come later?"

"Later. I met him in 'Nam in
nineteen seventy. Perry'd been thrown out of Cal and gone to work for a
leftist magazine. He went to 'Nam to report on the war for them, but
they folded shortly after he got there. When I met him, he was living
with a family near Cam Ranh Bay. He had a baby boy by one of the
daughters. He was lonely for American company, so he hung out at a bar
with some of us liberals from the base, talking about the war and what
was going down back home. Then his woman and son were killed in the
mortar shelling. Right after that, Perry went back to California."

"And then?"

Hank shrugged. "He enrolled in
S.F. State and got his degree in accounting. Married again, had two
more boys. Was divorced about ten years ago, lived alone in this flat,
and worked at Geary and Twenty-second, for one of those tax firms
that's a cut above H&R Block."

"How'd you come to be his
attorney?"

"I ran into him at Churchill's
Pub one night about five years ago. Recognized him right off—as you
pointed out, he hadn't changed much except for having short hair. After
that he came to see me about a minor legal problem, and we started to
meet fairly frequently, always at Churchill's."

"Were you close friends?"

"Not really. Why?"

"I just wondered about him
becoming an accountant. And living like this." I gestured around the
plain, conventional-looking kitchen. "It doesn't fit with his past."

"No, it doesn't. But the few
times I tried to ask him about it, he just changed the subject."

"What did you usually talk about?"

"My work. All Souls. He was
interested in the workings of a low-cost legal services plan. Sports;
he was a Giants fan. And old movies—he watched a lot of them, mostly
from the thirties and forties. But I had the feeling that anything more
personal was off limits."

"What do you suppose happened to
make him that way?"

"I don't know, but I sensed it in
'Nam, too. He wasn't quite as closed off then, but if anybody got on
the subject of the old days at Berkeley, Perry all of a sudden
remembered someplace else he had to be." Hank looked at his watch. "But
enough—we'd better get busy. I've only got today free to work on
clearing this place out, and the landlady wants to start showing it on
Monday."

I drained my coffee mug and
stood. "What do you want me to do?"

"You could box up the books and
videotapes and other stuff in the living room. The Salvation Army'll
pick up everything on Monday."

"You mentioned Hilderly's
sons—won't they want any of it?"

"Their mother said no. Apparently
he wasn't close to the boys. She remarried a long time ago, and they
live over in Blackhawk—that fancy development near Danville. But the
kids are provided for in the will; Perry inherited a substantial amount
from his mother a few years after the divorce. It's to be divided
equally between the boys."

"I see. Well, I'd better get to
it." I started for the door.

"Shar," Hank said.

I turned.

"Thanks for helping. This is
easily the worst part about being executor of an estate."

"No problem."

He added, "Even though Perry
and I weren't all that close, his death has really upset me. You know?"

I nodded. "Probably because of
the way he died. These snipings. If they hadn't been spread out over
more than three months, the city would be in a panic right now—like
when the
Zebra
killings were going on."

"You're probably right. I find
myself getting paranoid. I worked late a couple of nights last week,
and when I left I could have sworn there was someone lurking around
outside All Souls."

"Nerves."

"Typical urban ailment."

I went down the hall to the front
room and dragged a carton over to the brick-and-board bookcase opposite
the bay window. Perry Hilderly's books were mainly texts on accounting,
tax law, math, statistics, and investing. The number of them and their
presence didn't surprise me, but what did was the absence of any
lighter reading material such as magazines, novels, or nonfiction that
didn't relate to his profession. Finally on the bottom shelf I found a
few volumes on film: guides to serials, crime movies, and
film
noir,
plus a few books about old TV series such as "Perry Mason."
I boxed them all, then turned to the videotapes.

There were hundreds of them,
stacked against the wall behind the TV: Bogart, Tracy and Hepburn,
Barbara
Stanwyck, William Powell, Gary Grant; a full run of Charlie Chans
and Mr. Motos and the Topper series; westerns, comedies, drama. Not one
of them had been produced later than the mid-fifties. It made me wonder
if Hilderly hadn't been trying to pretend the sixties and seventies and
eighties had never happened.

After I boxed the tapes, I looked
around for what Hank had called "the other stuff." There wasn't much of
it. A water-stained lobby card for a Bogart movie called
All
Through the Night,
framed but with badly cracked glass. A carved
wooden box, the kind you find at Cost Plus, containing two sets of worn
playing
cards. A set of Capiz-shell coasters. A silver-plated table lighter,
nonfunctional. A brass bowl, also Cost Plus quality, containing nothing
but a paper clip and some dust. I put the smaller items into a carton
and left it and the lobby card on the cracked vinyl recliner that faced
the TV. Then I unplugged the TV, unhooked the VCR, and shoved the stand
over by the ugly plaid couch. The act held a depressing finality.

When I went down the hall, I
found Hank in the bedroom. He was folding the clothing that lay on the
bed and stuffing it into a big plastic trash bag, where it immediately
became unfolded and jumbled. One look at his woebegone face made me
say, "Let me do that while you get started on the kitchen."

He nodded, looking grateful, and
gently set down the sweater he held.

I'd never had to dispose of a
dead friend's possessions, but I guessed the clothing must be the most
difficult task of all. Even though I hadn't known Hilderly personally,
I also found myself smoothing and folding each item before placing it
in the bag; somehow it seemed a negation of the person to toss his
garments in there like so many rags.

As I worked I could hear Hank
clinking dishes in the kitchen, but after a while the sounds stopped,
and I feared he'd become discouraged again. I finished with the
clothing, stripped the bed, checked to make sure there was nothing in
the bureau or nightstand drawers. Then I went back there.

Hank was sitting at the table, a
sheaf of papers spread before him. When I came in, he looked up at me,
his face a study in shock and bewilderment.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"These were in a plastic bag in
the freezer." He gestured at the papers. "Perry told me to look for his
important documents there—said it was a good fireproof place, and
cheaper than a safe-deposit box."

I looked closer at what lay
before him. There were stock certificates, an automobile pink
slip, a number of savings-account passbooks, and some other papers.
"So?"

"This," he said, fingering a
document with
a
pale
blue cover sheet, "is a copy of the will
I drew up for him four years ago. I had the original in the All Souls
safe, and I've already entered it into probate. But this"—he held up a
page covered in cramped handwriting—"is a second will, superseding the
first one."

"Is it legal?"

"Yes. It's a holograph, and he
did it properly. It's dated three weeks ago."

"And?"

"It's totally different from the
first. Cuts out his kids entirely and makes no explanation of why. He
leaves his money to be divided equally among four people—and damned if
I know who they are, or what they were to him."

Hank handed me the sheet of
paper, and I scanned it quickly. From the legal terminology, I gathered
that Hilderly had copied it from his original will, changing only the
names under the section headed "Specific Bequests." The conditions for
the executor and disposal of personal effects were as Hank had
described them, but instead of Hilderly's sons, four individuals were
to share equally in "all cash, securities, and other financial assets":
Jess Goodhue, Thomas Y. Grant, Libby Heikkinen, and David Arlen Taylor.
Hilderly did not specify their relationship to him, but he did state
that he was making no provision for his former wife and children. The
will didn't look as official as the typed copy from All Souls, but if
Hank said it was legal, it had to be.

My fingers touched something
attached to the other side of the sheet. I turned it over, found one of
those yellow stick-on memos. On it Hilderly had written, "Hank: You'll
know how to contact Goodhue and Grant, but you'll have to trace
Heikkinen and Taylor. Sorry for the inconvenience." I peeled the memo
off and handed it to Hank.

He read it and grimaced in
annoyance. "Sure, Perry. I've never heard of any of these people!"

"You must know who Jess Goodhue
is."

"Why the hell would I?"

"She's a co-anchor on the KSTS
evening news."

"You forgot—I don't watch
broadcast news."

"Oh, right." For as long as I've
known him, Hank has been a news snob; he prefers his information
written—in depth, and in quantity. Every day he reads at least five
papers: the San
Francisco Chronicle
and
Examiner,
the
New York Times,
the
Wall Street Journal,
and the
Los
Angeles
Times.
Every week he pores over the newsmagazines, regardless of
their political orientation, and when he runs out of those he's likely
to be found with his nose stuck in
Business Week, Sports
Illustrated,
or a legal journal. But one place he is never found
is in front of the TV at six or eleven in the evening.