When the Bough Breaks (36 page)

At the mention of each name her face registered pain sequentially, as if her bones were being broken in stages.

“I’m not with them. But I want to know more about them.”

She raised herself to a squat, stood, and picked up the bloodied raincoat. Carefully she placed it over the dog’s still form.

“I’ll talk to you,” she said.

25

T
HERE
WAS
an entrance to the four-car garage that had eluded me: At ground level, hidden behind an untrimmed blue spruce, was a window covered with chicken-coop wire mesh. She kneeled, played with a couple of strategic strands and the mesh came loose. A push, a wriggle and she was inside. I followed. I was much larger and it wasn’t easy. My injured arm brushed against the pane and I had to hold my breath to stop from crying out as I squeezed through.

A half-jump brought me to a narrow room that had originally been a root cellar. It was damp and dark, the walls lined with shallow wooden shelving, the floor of poured concrete painted red. There was a wooden shutter above the window, held in place by an eye and hook. She unfastened it and it slammed shut. There was a second of darkness during which I braced myself for something devious. Instead came the pleasing pungence of kerosene, reminiscent of teenage love by the light of the campfire, and smoky illumination. She tilted the slats of the shutter so that additional light came in but visibility from the outside was obscured.

My eyes adjusted to the light and the details came into focus: A thin pallet and bedroll lay on the floor. The kerosene lamp, a hot plate, a can of Sterno and a packet of plastic utensils shared space on a rickety wooden table that had been painted and repainted so many times it looked like soft sculpture. There was a utility sink in one corner and above it a rack holding an empty jam jar, a toothbrush, toothpowder, safety razor and a bar of laundry soap. Most of the remaining floor space was taken up by wooden milk cartons of a type I hadn’t seen since childhood. The boxes had tube-shaped hand holes on two sides and bore the imprint of “Farmer Del’s Dairy, Tacoma, Wash—Our Butter Is Best, Put It to the Test.” Below the slogan was a picture of
a bored-looking heifer and a phone number with a two-letter prefix. She’d stacked the cartons three-high in places. The contents of some of them were visible—packets of freeze-dried food, canned goods, paper towels, folded clothing. Three pairs of shoes, all rubber-soled and sturdy, were lined up neatly against the wall. There were metal hooks hammered into a raw wood support beam. She hung her slicker on one of them and sat down on a straight-backed chair of unfinished pine. I settled myself on an overturned milk carton.

We looked at each other.

In the absence of competing stimuli the pain in my arm took over. I winced, and she saw it.

She got up, soaked a paper towel in warm water, came over and swabbed the wound. She poked around in one of the boxes and found sterile gauze, adhesive tape and hydrogen peroxide. Tending to me like Florence Nightingale, she bandaged the arm. The craziness of the situation wasn’t lost on me—minutes ago she’d tried to kill me, now she clucked maternally and smoothed down the tape. I stayed karate-wary, expecting her to revert at any moment to murderous rage, to dig her fingers into the inflamed flesh and take advantage of the blinding pain to jab me in the eye.

But when she was finished she returned to her seat.

“The papers,” I reminded her.

More poking around. But quick. She knew exactly where everything was. A sheaf of papers bound with a thick rubber band found its way into my hand. There were veterinarian’s bills, rabies vaccination records, Kennel Club registration—the dog’s full name had been Otto Klaus Von Schulderheis out of Stuttgart-Munsch and Sigourn-Daffodil. Quaint. There were also diplomas from two obedience schools in L.A. and a certificate stating that Otto had been trained as an attack dog for defensive purposes only. I handed the papers back to her.

“Thank you,” she said.

We sat across from one another, pleasant as school chums. I took a good look at her and tried to work up some genuine animosity. What I saw was a sad-looking Oriental woman in her forties, her hair chopped China-doll short, sallow, frail, homely in baggy work clothes and shabby as a churchmouse. She sat, hands in lap, docile. The hatred wouldn’t come.

“How long have you been living here?”

“Six months. Since Stuart’s death.”

“Why live like this—why not open up the house?”

“I thought this would be better for hiding. All I want is to be alone.”

She didn’t make much of a Garbo.

“Hiding from whom?”

She looked at the floor.

“Come on. I won’t hurt you.”

“The others. The other sick ones.”

“Names.”

“The ones you mentioned and others.” She spit out a half-dozen other names I didn’t recognize.

“Let’s be specific. By sick you mean child molesters—all those men are child molesters?”

“Yes, yes. I didn’t know it. Stuart told me later, when he was in prison. They volunteered at a children’s home, took the kids to their houses. Did sick things with them.”

“And at your school, too.”

“No! That was only Stuart. The others never came to the school. Only at the children’s home.”

“La Casa de los Niños. Your husband was a member of the Gentleman’s Brigade.”

“Yes. He told me he was doing it to help children. His friends recruited him, he said. The judge, the doctor, the others. I thought it was so nice of him—we didn’t have children of our own—I was proud of him. I never knew what he was really doing—just like I didn’t know about what he did at the school.”

I said nothing.

“I know what you’re thinking—what they all thought. That I knew all along. How could I not know what my own husband was doing in my own house? You blame me as much as you blame Stuart. I tell you, I didn’t know!”

Her arms went out beseechingly, the hands saffron talons. I noticed that the nails had been gnawed to the quick. There was a desperate, feral look on her face.

“I did not know,” she repeated, turning it into a self-punishing mantra. “I did not know. He was my husband but I did not know!”

She was in need of absolution but I didn’t feel like a father confessor. I stayed tight-lipped and observed her with forced detachment.

“You must understand the kind of marriage Stuart and I had to see how he could have been doing all of those things without my knowledge.”

My silence said Convince me.

She bowed her head and began.

“We met in Seoul,” she said, “shortly after the war. My father had been a professor of linguistics. Our family was prosperous, but we had ties to the socialists and the KCIA killed them all. They went on rampages after the war, murdering intellectuals, anyone who wasn’t a blind slave to the regime. Everything we owned was confiscated or destroyed. I was hidden, given to friends the day before KCIA thugs broke into
the house and slit the throats of everyone—family, servants, even the animals. Things got worse, the government clamped down harder. The family that took me in grew frightened and I was turned out to the street. I was fifteen years old, but very small, very skinny, looking twelve. I begged, ate scraps. I—I sold myself. I had to. To survive.”

She stopped, looked past me, gathered her strength and continued.

“When Stuart found me I was feverish, infested with lice and venereal disease, covered with sores. It was at night. I was huddled under newspapers in an alley at the back of a café where the GI’s went to eat and drink and find bar girls. I knew it was good to wait in such places because Americans threw away enough food to feed entire families. I was so sick I could barely move, but I waited for hours, forcing myself to stay awake so the cats wouldn’t get my dinner first. The restaurant closed shortly after midnight. The soldiers came out, loud, drunk, staggering through the alley. Then Stuart, by himself, sober. Later I found out he never drank alcohol. I tried to keep quiet but my pain made me cry out. He heard, came over, so big, a giant in uniform, bending over me saying ‘Don’t worry, little girl.’ He picked me up in his arms and took me to his apartment. He had lots of money, enough to rent his own place off base. The GI’s were on R and R, celebrating, making lots of unwanted babies. Stuart had nothing to do with those kinds of things. He used his place to write poetry. To fiddle with his cameras. To be alone.”

She seemed to lose track of time and space, and staring absently at the dark wooden walls.

“He took you to his place,” I prompted.

“For five weeks he nursed me. He brought doctors, bought medicine. Fed me, bathed me, sat at my bedside reading comic books—I loved American comic books because my father had always brought them home to me from his travels. Little Orphan Annie. Terry and the Pirates. Dagwood. Blondie. He read them all to me, in a soft, gentle voice. He was different from any man I’d ever met. Thin, quiet, like a teacher, with those eyeglasses that made his eyes look so big, like a big bird.

“By the sixth week I was well. He came into bed and made love to me. I know now it was part of the sickness—he must have thought I was a child, that must have excited him. But I felt like a woman. Over the years as I became a woman, when I was clearly no longer a child, he lost interest in me. He used to like to dress me up in little girl’s things—I’m small, I could fit into them. But when I grew up, saw the world outside, I would have nothing to do with that. I asserted myself and he withdrew. Maybe that was when he started to act out his sickness. Maybe,” she said in a wounded voice, “it was my fault. For not satisfying him.”

“No. He was a troubled man. You don’t have to bear that responsibility,” I said, not with total sincerity. I didn’t want it all to deteriorate into a wet session of self-recrimination.

“I don’t know. Even now it seems so unreal. The papers, the stories about him. About us. He was such a kind man, gentle, quiet.”

I’d heard similar pictures painted of other child molesters. Often they were exceptionally mild-mannered men, with a natural ability to gain rapport with their young victims. But of course it had to be that way: kids won’t flock to an unshaven ogre in a soiled trenchcoat. They
will
be drawn to Uncle Wally who’s so much nicer than mean old Mom and Dad and all the other grownups who don’t
understand
. To Uncle Wally with his magic tricks and neat collection of baseball cards and really terrific toys at his house and mopeds and video recorders, and cameras and neat, weird books …

“You must understand how much I loved him,” she was saying. “He saved my life. He was American. He was rich. He said he loved me too. ‘My little geisha’ he called me. I’d laugh and tell him ‘No, I’m Korean, you silly. The Japanese are pigs!’ He’d smile and call me his little geisha again.

“We lived together in Seoul for four months. I waited for him to get off-base on leave, cooked for him, cleaned, brought him his slippers. Was his wife. When his discharge papers came, he told me he was taking me back to the states. I was in heaven. Of course his family—there was only a mother and some elderly aunts—would have nothing to do with me. Stuart didn’t care. He had money of his own, trust funds from his father. We traveled together to Los Angeles. He said he’d gone to school there—he did go to medical school, but flunked out. He took a job as a medical technician. He didn’t need to work, it was a job that didn’t pay much, but he liked it, said it kept him busy. He liked the machines—the meters and the test tubes—he was always a tinkerer. Gave me his entire paycheck, as if it was petty cash, told me to spend it on myself.

“We lived together that way for three years. I wanted marriage, but couldn’t ask. It took me a while to get used to American ways, to women not being just property, to having rights. I pushed it when I wanted children. Stuart was indifferent to the idea, but he went along with it. We married. I tried to get pregnant but couldn’t. I saw doctors, at UCLA, Stanford, Mayo. They all said there was too much scarring. I’d been so sick in Korea, it shouldn’t have surprised me, but I didn’t want to believe it. Looking back now, I know it was a good thing we did not have any little ones. At the time, after I finally accepted it, I became depressed. Very withdrawn, not eating. Eventually Stuart couldn’t ignore it any longer. He suggested I go to school. If I loved children I could work with them, become a teacher. He may have had
his own motives, but he seemed concerned for me—whenever I was sick or low he was at his best.

“I enrolled in junior college, then college, and learned so much. I was a good student,” she recalled, smiling. “Very motivated. For the first time I was out in the world, with other people—until then I’d
been
Stuart’s little geisha. Now I began to think for myself. At the same time he drifted away from me. There was no anger, no resentment that he put into words. He simply spent more time with his cameras and his bird books—he used to like to read books and magazines on nature, though he never hiked or walked. An armchair bird lover. An armchair man.

“We became two distant cousins living in the same house. Neither of us cared, we were busy. I studied every spare moment, by now I knew I wanted to go beyond the bachelor’s and get a credential in early childhood. We went our own ways. There were weeks when we never saw each other. There was no communication, no marriage. But no divorce either—what would have been the point? There were no fights. It was live and let live. My new friends, my college friends, told me I was liberated, I should be happy to have a husband who didn’t bother me. When I became lonely I went deeper into my studies.

“I finished the credential and they gave me field placements at local preschools. I liked working with the little ones but I thought I could run a better school than those I had seen. I told Stuart, he said sure, anything to keep me happy, out of his way. We bought a big house in Brentwood—there always seemed to be money for anything—and I started Kim’s Korner. It was a wonderful place, a wonderful time. I finally stopped mourning not having children of my own. Then he—”

She stopped, covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth.