29

Ed Wagner died. We postponed our trip to Wisconsin.

Ed was old and sick. He wasn’t terminal. He died unexpectedly. The Wagner sisters buried him beside Leoda. The cemetery was a hundred yards from Janet’s back door.

I didn’t know him. I saw him a dozen times total. I took my father’s hard line against him. He was a kraut and a draft dodger. It was a shaky indictment. Ed always treated me well. He was pleased to learn that I was alive and successful. I never called him. I wanted to see him. I owed him apologies. I wanted to extend them face-to-face.

I called the Wagner sisters. We made travel plans before their father died. We started out nervous. We unclenched. Janet said Leoda would have been so proud of me. I disagreed. I wanted to destroy Leoda’s take on her sister. Janet said Leoda would not tolerate slurs on Geneva. Ed was more open-minded. He had a balanced view. Jean drank too much. She was troubled. She never shared her troubles.

I spoke frankly. My cousins reciprocated. I described my mother’s life and death in blunt terms. They said I broke Leoda’s heart. I said I tried to patch things up with her 18 years ago. I critiqued my mother tactlessly. Leoda was shocked. I blew my shot at reconciliation.

Jeannie was 49. She managed a local greenhouse. Her husband was a college professor. They had two sons and a daughter. Janet married a carpenter. They had three sons and a daughter. The last time I saw them was Christmas ’66. Leoda flew me to Wisconsin. The mark wasn’t hip to the con man.

Leoda got hip. She hipped her daughters. Leoda packed a mean grudge. Her daughters didn’t. They welcomed me back. Jeannie was reserved. Janet was enthusiastic. She said she didn’t know much about the Spalding marriage. She knew the marriage bellied up fast. She didn’t know the wedding site or the circumstances surrounding the annulment or divorce. She didn’t know Spaiding’s first name. Janet was four years old in June ’58. Jeannie was almost twelve. Leoda said Aunt Jean went to the store and got kidnapped. The police found her body the next morning. Leoda abridged my mother’s death the same way she expurgated her life.

Janet sent me a copy of the Hilliker family tree. It surprised me. I thought my grandparents were German immigrants. I don’t know where I got the idea. My ancestors had English names. My grandmother’s name was Jessie Woodard Hilliker. She had a twin sister named Geneva. The tree listed Hillikers, Woodards, Smiths, Pierces and Linscotts. They went back 150 years in America.

Ed and Leoda were dead. They couldn’t dispute my claim. I would have fought Leoda’s claim tactfully. My cousins barely knew my mother. I could let them in. I could share my mother superficially. I could hoard her dark heart for myself.

Cross Plains was a Madison suburb. Bill and I flew in to the Madison Airport.

Janet met us. She brought her husband, her youngest son and her daughter. I didn’t recognize her. She was 12 years old in ’66.1 didn’t see any Hilliker resemblance.

Brian Klock was 47. We shared the same birthday. Janet said Leoda prayed for me on Brian’s birthday. It was my birthday. She never forgot it. Brian was short and stocky. All the Klocks were short and stocky. Mindy Klock was 16. She played classical piano. She said she’d play some Beethoven for me. Casey Klock was 12. He looked like a rambunctious kid. The male Klocks had great hair. I expressed envy. Brian and Casey laughed. Bill eased right into the flow. He was the most deft social creature I’d ever known.

The Klocks drove us to a Holiday Inn. We took them to dinner downstairs. Talk flowed evenly. Bill described our investigation. Mindy asked me if I knew any movie stars. She mentioned her current flames. I said they were homosexual. She didn’t believe me. I ran down some Hollywood gossip. Janet and Brian laughed. Bill laughed and said I was full of shit. Casey picked his nose and played with his food.

We had a good time. Janet laid out the plan for tomorrow. We’d drive to Tunnel City and Tomah. We’d pick up Jeannie en route. I mentioned the pictures. She said she had them at home. We could see them first thing tomorrow.

We lingered over dinner. The food was strange. Every dish came with an order of melted cheese and sausage. I figured it was a regional aberration. The Klocks had regional accents. All their words were upwardly inflected. Ed and Leoda talked that way. Their voices came out of thin air. I couldn’t recall my mother’s voice.

We talked about her. Janet and Brian were reverent. I told them to loosen up a little.

The pictures were old. They were pasted into scrapbooks and pulled out of envelopes. I examined them at Janet’s kitchen table. The kitchen window overlooked the Wagner gravesite.

Most of the pictures were black & white and sepia-tinted. A few were late-’4os color. I looked at my ancestors first. I got a glimpse of Tunnel City, Wisconsin. I saw railroad tracks in every outdoor shot.

My great-grandparents. A stern Victorian couple. They posed sternly. Candid snapshots didn’t exist then. I saw the Hilliker-Woodard wedding portrait. Earle looked like a gritty young man. Jessie was frail and lovely. She had a version of my face and my mother’s face and some features we didn’t inherit. She wore glasses. She had our small eyes. She gave my mother delicate shoulders and soft white skin.

I saw my mother. I followed her from infanthood to ten years old. I saw her with Leoda. Leoda stared at her big sister. Every picture framed her adulation. Geneva wore glasses. She had light red hair. She smiled. She looked happy. Her interior backdrops were spare. She was raised in a no-frills house. Her exterior backdrops were beautiful and raw. Western Wisconsin was dark green in bloom or snowy and dead-tree barren.

I jumped ahead. I had to. There were no pictures of my mother as an adolescent. I jumped ten years. I saw Geneva at 20. Her hair was darker. She possessed a severe and breathtakingly implacable beauty.

She wore her hair in a bun. She parted it down the middle. It was a frumpy hairdo. She wore it with imperious confidence. She knew how she should look. She knew how to control her image.

She looked proud. She looked determined. She looked like she was thinking about something.

I jumped ahead. I saw three color snaps from August ’47. My mother was two months pregnant. She was standing with Leoda. One of the pictures was cropped. Leoda probably x’d out my father. My mother was 32. Her features had settled in resolutely. She still wore that bun. Why get frivolous and mess with your trademark? She was smiling. She wasn’t abstracted. She wasn’t so fiercely proud.

I saw a black & white shot. My father wrote the date on the back. I recognized his printing. He wrote a little note below the date:

“Perfection. And who am I to gild the lily?”

It was August ’46. It was Beverly Hills. It couldn’t be any place else. A swimming pool. Some French-chateau cabanas. A scene from a movie-biz party. My mother was sitting in a deck chair. She was wearing a summer dress. She was smiling. She looked delightedly content.

She was with my father then. He was on Rita Hayworth’s payroll.

I saw some more black & white shots. They were mid-’40s vintage. I recognized the common exterior. It was 459 North Doheny My mother was wearing a light-colored dress and spectator pumps. The dress was perfect for her. It looked like high fashion on a low budget. She was poised. She wore a different hairstyle. Her bun was braided and pinned on the sides. I couldn’t read her face.

I came to the most stunning pictures. They were posed photographs blown up to portrait size.

My mother was sitting on and standing by a split-rail fence. She was 24 or 25 years old. She was wearing a plaid shirt, a windbreaker, jodhpurs and boots that laced up to the knees. She was wearing a wedding ring. The pictures looked like honeymoon shots sans husband. My father or the Spalding guy were somewhere off-camera. This was Geneva Hilliker. This was my mother with no male surname. She was too proud to pander. Men came to her. She pinned her hair up and made competence and rectitude beauty. She was there with a man. She was standing alone. She was defying all claims past and present.

Tunnel City and Tomah were three hours northwest. We drove there in Brian Klock’s van. Brian and Janet sat up front. Bill and I sat in the back.

We took back roads. Wisconsin shot by in five basic colors. The hills were green. The sky was blue. The barns and silos were red, white and silver.

The landscape was nice. I ignored it. I balanced a stack of pictures on my lap. I looked at them. I held them out at different angles. I held them up to odd shafts of light. Bill asked me if I was okay. I said, I don’t know.

We picked up Jeannie. I recognized her. She had my beady brown eyes. We got the beads from Jessie Hilliker and the brown from our respective fathers.

Jeannie found this Ellroy thing disruptive. Her father died three weeks ago. Bill and I were drama that she did not need. She was distant. She wasn’t rude or inhospitable. Bill asked her about the murder. She retold Leoda’s story verbatim. Her parents never talked about the murder. Leoda stonewalled it. She lied about her sister’s death and revised her sister’s life accordingly.

We drove through boondock Wisconsin. I talked to Jeannie and looked at the pictures. Jeannie thawed out a bit. She got into the road trip spirit. I held some pictures up to my window and did some juxtapositions.

We passed an army base. I saw a sign for Tunnel City. Janet said the graveyard was just off the highway. She drove out here once before. She knew the key Hilliker sites.

We stopped at the graveyard. It was 30 yards square and unkempt. I looked at the headstones. I matched names to my family tree. I saw Hillikers, Woodards, Linscotts, Smiths and Pierces. Their birthdates ran back to 1840. Earle and Jessie were buried together. He died at 49. She died at 59. They died young. Their graves were badly neglected.

We drove into Tunnel City. I saw the railroad tracks and the railroad tunnel. Tunnel City was four streets wide and a third of a mile long. It was built along one hillside. The houses were brick and old clapboard. Some were nicely maintained. Some were not. Some people mowed their lawns. Some people dumped junk cars and speedboats on their lawns. There was no town center. There was a post office and a Methodist church. My mother went to that church. It was boarded up now. The railroad station was padlocked. Janet showed us the old Hilliker house. It looked like a raised bomb shelter. It was red brick and 25 feet square.

I looked at the town. I looked at the pictures.

We drove to Tomah. We passed a sign for Hilliker’s Tree Farm. Janet said Leigh’s kids owned it. We pulled into Tomah. Janet said the sisters moved here in ’30. Tomah was a time-warp town. It was a prewar movie set. The Pizza Hut and Kinko’s signs gave away the era. The main drag was called Superior Avenue. Residential streets cut across it. The lots were big. The houses were all white clapboard. The Hilliker house was two blocks off the avenue. It was adorned and refurbished and rendered anachronistic. My mother lived in that house. She grew into her stern beauty in this pretty little town.

We parked and looked at the house. I looked at the pictures. Bill looked at them. He said Geneva was the best-looking girl in Tomah, Wisconsin. I said she couldn’t wait to get out forever.

We drove back to Avalanche. We had dinner at Jeannie’s house. I met Jeannie’s husband, Terry, and her two sons. Her daughter was away at college.

Terry had long hair and a beard. He looked like the Unabomber. The boys were 17 and 12. They wanted to hear some cop stories. Bill riffed and riffed and took the social heat off of me. I lapsed into a spectator mode. The pictures were back in the van. I resisted an urge to blow off the party and hole up with them.

Jeannie thawed out some more. Bill and I crashed her life. We distracted her. We jelled with her husband and kids. We gained credibility.

The party broke up at 11:00. I was dead-ass tired and speeding. Bill was fried. I knew he was running at a high RPM.

The Klocks drove us back to the Holiday Inn. We drank some late-night coffee and flew. I said we had to hit Chicago and Wisconsin again. We had to hit Geneva’s nursing school and Tomah. We had to find old classmates and old friends and surviving Hillikers. Bill agreed. He said he should make the trip solo. People might freeze up around Geneva’s son. He wanted them to talk with total candor.

I agreed. Bill said he’d set things up and fly east again.

I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I had the pictures upstairs. My mind wandered. Bill asked me what I was thinking.

I said, I hate the Swarthy Man now.

I went home. Bill went home. He set up interviews in Tomah and Chicago. Joe Walker found my parents’ divorce file. He found their marriage license and some old directory listings. He came up with some big surprises. Bill flew east. He checked newspaper files. He talked to Leigh Hilliker and his wife and three 80-year-old women. He talked to the superintendent of the West Suburban College of Nursing. He took rigorous notes. He flew home. He found Geneva’s nursing school roommate. He sent me his paperwork. Joe Walker sent me his. I read it. I read it with the pictures in front of me. Janet found more pictures. I saw Geneva in sunglasses and a shirt-and-slacks ensemble. I saw her in boots and jodhpurs again. The investigation cohered. The paperwork and the pictures formed a life in ellipsis.