Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (8 page)

Blackhawk, the development
where Hilderly's former wife and sons now lived, has long struck me as
a phenomenon that could only have occurred in the latter decades of the
twentieth century. It is an exclusive enclave of custom-built homes
nestled in the foothills of Mount Diablo, and insulated from the world
by high walls, a private security force, and recreational facilities
that ensure no resident need seek pleasure elsewhere. Everything is
designed for the ease and comfort of the busy property owners, most of
whom are engaged in making fortunes in the industrial parks that cover
what used to be farmland near San Ramon. A buyer may purchase a house
that is fully furnished and equipped, down to the last teaspoon and
guest towel; the local supermarket boasts of clocks that display the
time in such global cities as London, New York, and Tokyo—presumably so
shoppers can rush home and call their brokers before the stock
exchanges close. While Blackhawkians may appreciate and even need these
refinements, I find something vaguely depressing about a place where
life's edges have been so smoothed and rounded.

After I was admitted past the
guard station at one of the gates, I drove through a maze of large
homes on spacious lots to the Fleming house. It was mock Tudor, with a
big live oak in the front yard. I parked at the curb and went up a
flagstone walk that bisected the neatly barbered lawn.

When Judy Fleming answered the
door, I recognized her as an older version of the woman in Hilderly's
photo album; her short brown hair was now streaked with gray, and she
was no longer plump, her face having that gaunt look that comes from
frequent dieting. She greeted me pleasantly and led me to the rear of
her air-conditioned house, where an informal living room overlooked a
swimming pool full of noisy teenagers. The room, a dining area, and the
kitchen were all connected, and there was a lived-in feel to the space
that had been missing from the more formal rooms we'd passed on the way.

Mrs. Fleming seated me on the
couch, offered coffee— which I accepted—and went to pour it from a
percolator that stood on the wet bar. She hesitated, then poured a
second mug for herself. "I shouldn't," she said. "I drink too much of
it. But I'm dieting, and it keeps me going."

She certainly did look tired, I
thought as she seated herself in a rocking chair opposite me. Bluish
circles under her eyes were more pronounced in the late sunlight that
slanted through the glass doors behind her, and her movements were
weary, almost leaden. I suspected her fatigue stemmed less from unwise
dieting than from her ex-husband's death and altered will.

A roar of laughter—muted by the
closed doors—rose from the pool, and the kids began clapping; two boys
had just tossed a struggling girl in. Mrs. Fleming smiled and said,
"It's good to hear laughter around here. The last week and a half have
been grim. My boys weren't close to Perry—by his choice, not mine or
theirs—but his death and now this business of the new will have been
upsetting."

"Why did he choose to distance
himself from his sons?"
 

"That was his way. It was one of
the reasons I divorced him. The main reason, actually." She paused.
"I've always loved Perry, though. That's why this business of him
disinheriting the boys is so hard to take."

"Hank Zahn had the impression you
don't mind about the money."

"About the money, no. It's
Perry's lack of caring and the . . .
inexplicableness
of what
he did that's disturbing."

"So far I've been able to locate
two of Perry's new beneficiaries—Thomas Y. Grant and Jess Goodhue. Did
he ever mention either of them to you?"

She shook her head.

"What about a David Arlen Taylor,
Libby Heikkinen, or Jenny Ruhl?"

"None of those names is familiar.
I'm sure I'd remember if I'd known or heard of them."

"Well, neither of the two I've
spoken to claims to have known Perry, or understands why he would name
them in his will. Perhaps when I locate Taylor and Heikkinen, they can
shed some light on his reasons. The other person I mentioned, Jenny
Ruhl, was the mother of Jess Goodhue. Goodhue thought her mother might
have known Perry at Berkeley."

"That would have been long before
I met him."

"When was that, and where?"

"At S.F. State, after he'd come
back from Vietnam. I was only nineteen; he was several years older, and
very intriguing to me. A distant, silent,
haunted
man, who had
already lost a wife and a child. I thought I could help him, bring him
out of himself. That's how naive I was!"

"I take it he remained distant."

"Yes. It wasn't until after my
first son, Kurt, was born that I realized how distant. I remember
looking at Kurt and wondering which of us he would be more like—Perry
or me. And then it came to me that I knew virtually nothing of the man
who had fathered him."
 

"Do you mean what he thought and
felt, or actual biographical details?"

"Both. Oh, he'd sketched out a
chronology for me when we first met, but it was more like an outline,
with none of the substance."

 "Where was Perry
originally from?"

"Albuquerque."

I thought of the father wearing a
string tie who had visited Jess Goodhue. "Did he speak of his
childhood?"

"More than any other part of his
life. It sounded fairly normal. I never met his father; he died when
Perry was in high school. His mother had remarried and they traveled a
lot; I only met her once. She was quite outgoing, so wherever he got
his remoteness, it wasn't from her."

"And you divorced Perry ten years
ago?"

"Ten years next month. Toward the
end we were living in Pacifica. We'd bought a house. Perry commuted to
the city. He kept long hours—purposely, I thought. It wasn't as if he
didn't love the boys or me; he just couldn't cope with the intimacy of
family life. Eventually he became more like the fog that drifted in and
out, rather than a husband or father. I felt as if I were failing him
when I divorced him, but he seemed more relieved than anything else. I
guess he'd gotten in over his head emotionally by marrying and having a
family."

The kind of uninvolved individual
Mrs. Fleming described didn't mesh with the young man who had clowned
and laughed his way through the stormy days at Berkeley. Even the man
Hank had known in Vietnam had sounded more connected to others. I
wondered if it had been the deaths of the woman and child over there
that had changed him. But even when they had been alive, Hilderly had
been closed off in certain respects,

I asked, "After the divorce, did
you see Perry?"

"Very occasionally. He'd pick up
the boys on their birthdays to take them to the city to the zoo or a
ball game. On Christmas he'd send gifts—usually
ones that were inappropriate for their age levels—and call. But that
was the extent of it."

I'd been wrong in thinking Judy
Fleming knew anything useful about her husband's past. "I know you find
Perry changing his will inexplicable," I said, "but I'd like to ask you
to think over the contacts you and your sons have had with him in, say,
the past year. Was there anything in his behavior that even hinted he
might do such a thing?"

She considered, pleating the
fabric of her skirt between her fingers. "One occasion comes to mind.
Perry was behaving oddly . . . but maybe you'd best talk to Kurt about
it. He was there and I wasn't." She went to the glass door and opened
it, called out to one of the boys by the pool. He came to the house,
toweling himself off as he walked.

At around sixteen Kurt looked
quite a bit like early pictures of his father. He was tall and lanky,
but possessed of a natural grace; his hair was blond, curly, and
somewhat on the long side. He shook my hand and greeted me with a
directness unusual in one of his age.

The introductions over, Kurt sat
down on the raised stone hearth, his long arms wrapped around his bare
knees. His mother said, "Tell Ms. McCone about your birthday
celebration with Perry." To me she added, "Neither of the boys felt
close enough to call him 'Dad.' That's what they call my husband."

Kurt asked, "You mean tell her
about the weird stuff?"

Judy Fleming nodded.

"Okay. This was in the middle of
June, a Saturday. I went into the city on BART and we took in a Giants
game. Perry was kind of quiet. I thought it might be because for my
present he'd given me this video game that was really for young kids,
and I couldn't work up much enthusiasm over it." Kurt paused, looking
at his mother. "He was always doing that. You remember the year he gave
me the big stuffed koala bear for Christmas?
I was thirteen and into Indiana Jones."

Mrs. Fleming merely smiled.

"Okay," Kurt went on, "after the
game we started back here and stopped in Walnut Creek at a Mexican
restaurant. Perry got into the margaritas. They make a strong one
there—" He glanced at his mother again. "Or so I'm told. Perry had
four. After the second he started going on, sort of—what's that word I
just learned? Maundering." He seemed to savor the new word; his mouth
shaped it as if he were tasting each syllable.

"About what?" I asked.

"All sorts of stuff. He started
by asking me if I'd decided on a college yet, but before I could
answer, he said that the decisions people make early on are important,
that the wrong one can change the whole course of your life. He said
that even a right decision can come back at you later, even if you know
you did the right thing."

"That sounds like fairly standard
father-to-son advice."

"You didn't know Perry. He wasn't
much on advice. Anyway, then he started going on about this seminar
he'd had to go to for his job a couple of weeks before. He said he
hadn't wanted to go, but that it was one of the best things that ever
happened to him. 'It's changed my whole life,' he said. 'I know what I
have to do to get in touch with my former self.'"

"Those were his exact words?"

"More or less."

"What kind of seminar was it?"

"He didn't say, and I couldn't
ask; he was getting
really
weird by that time. Then he started
in on . . . well, what he said was, 'You can't beat yourself up for
being unable to control the consequences of your actions.' And other
stuff along that line."

It sounded to me as if Hilderly
had been trying to articulate the preachings of a pop
psychologist to his son—and had not done too good a job of it.
"Anything else?"

"Well, there was some stuff about
ideals. How you should hang on to them, but sometimes you had to dump
some in order to live up to the most important of all. And then he got
into guilt and atonement. All the time I was trying to eat my
enchiladas, he was sucking up margaritas and carrying on like a
born-again."

"Maybe he
had
gotten
involved in some religion; there's a lot of that going around."

Kurt looked dubious. His mother
said, "I can't imagine that. Perry was a lifelong atheist."

 "What else
did he say?" I asked Kurt.

"Not much that made any sense.
It worried
me; I'd never seen him that way before. Like Mom says, I wasn't close
to Perry, but he was a nice man, and I hated to see him sort of ...
losing it. You think maybe he was cracking up, and that was why he made
that weird will?"

"Maybe." I made a mental note to
ask Hilderly's former employer about the seminar he'd attended late in
May.

"Well," Kurt said, "whatever made
him do it must have been really something. I know he loved my brother
and me, even if he was sort of off on another planet most of the time."
Up to now Kurt had sounded almost cavalier about his last dinner with
his father, but as he spoke a tremor came into his voice. He turned to
his mother. "I wish I could have done or said something—you know, to
let him know I cared."

Judy Fleming said, "Kurt, he knew
you cared."

"But there should have been
something.
I'm sorry
now that all those years I wasn't a better son to him."

Quickly she went to him and put
her arms around his shoulders. "You
were
a good son. You were
the best you could be, under the circumstances."

She could easily have countered
Kurt's feelings of regret by pointing out that Perry hadn't been much
of a father, but
instead
she'd chosen the more
difficult option of refusing to degrade her former husband's memory.
She may, as she'd said, have let Hilderly down when she divorced him,
but now, at the end, she hadn't failed him.

On the way back to the city I
stopped at a K-Mart to buy a birthday card and a hanging fuchsia plant
for Anne-Marie. By the time I reached the building she and Hank owned
on Twenty-sixth Street in Noe Valley, it was close to ten and a
refreshing fog once more enveloped San Francisco. I went up on the
front porch, fuchsia dangling from my hand, and surveyed the row of
hooks for plants that Anne-Marie had installed in front of the door to
her first-floor flat; one was still vacant, and the space was the right
size for my gift. I turned, nodding in satisfaction, but something
across the street caught my attention. I looked back. There was no one
over there, at least no one discernible, and all I heard were distant
traffic noises and voices down the block.