The Shadow Catcher

by Marianne Wiggins

  “—who are they?” Lester asks.

  “—Dean Martin. Ann-Margret. Phyllis Diller. You don’t recognize them—? Shecky Greene. Robert Goulet. Phyllis McGuire…”

  I realize there’s no reason why Lester should recognize these come-and-gone headliners from a culture not his own. Even I have started to forget them: “—Phyllis McGuire…of the McGuire Sisters? She was an It girl around Vegas years ago—Sam Giancana’s mistress. Wayne Newton, you don’t recognize him? Buddy Hackett.—Liza Minnelli…?”

  There’s a goldfish bowl full gambling chips that Lester lifts to look at.

  “—tips,” I tell him. People in this town tip the hotel staff with gambling chips, and if he was working as a doorman—” I study the building in the background of a Polaroid. “I wonder what hotel he worked at?”

  There are leather books stacked on the hutch, the top one reading AUTOGRAPHS. I flip it open:

  Johnny—

  When Opportunity Knocks

  Make Sure You’re the Doorman

  Howard Hughes

  1970

  There are other autographs—Paul Anka, Barry Manilow, Liberace’s signature candelabrum—four volumes’ worth of brief encounters, the earliest dating from 1970, the latest, 1991.

  “There’s nothing here to explain how he got the headdress and the bracelet,” Lester says. “Nothing at all.” He drifts back into the living room, I follow. On a table next to the sofa there are boxed games—Scrabble, Monopoly—and decks of cards beside a neat row of score pads. “He must know someone,” I comment, “you can’t play Monopoly alone, that’s an oxymoron…Greek word,” I add for Lester’s benefit, even though he’s turned his back to me to investigate the shelves of paperbacks arrayed on a low bookshelf under the window. I wander to the bedroom. The bed, a standard double, is neatly made and covered with the common cotton bedspread anyone can buy at any box store. There are two standard bed tables with drawers, crowned by two bedside lamps—no pictures, nor any ornamentation, on the walls. I slide open the drawer of the nearest bedside table and discover aspirin, a tube of Rolaids and a ubiquitous amber canister with a white plastic cap signifying a prescription. LIPITOR. A STATIN, for high cholesterol, prescribed by a local doctor, filled by a local pharmacy, for JOHN F. WIGGINS. He even took my father’s middle initial, I note. I close the drawer and walk around the bed, hesitate before I open the closet but then tell myself oh what the hell and do it. Two doorman long coats, one burgundy, one sky blue, both with more brass buttons than a circus ring leader’s, hang, like curated opera costumes, in plastic bags. I lift the bag of the sky blue one and read the words emblazoned on the buttons: THE SANDS. I search the top shelf of the closet for some hidden clue, search the floor behind the shoes but everything I see and touch tells me this mystery man, although he had his secrets, kept them to himself, dressed in regular clothes, lived in a regular house and lived an ordinary outward life.

  Nothing here can tell me where he came from or who he was before 1970. The year my father died.

  Not expecting to find anything revealing, I open the one remaining drawer of the bedside table on the far side of the bed and probably because the set-up is the same in countless hotel rooms I’ve stayed in across the country I’m not surprised to see the Bible there and almost close the drawer again until I notice that this Bible doesn’t look like the standard hardbacked version placed beside Best Western beds by the Gideons, this Bible is worn, its leather cover soft and pliable and in the lower right-hand corner, stamped in gold, a name: CURTIS EDWARDS.

  I take the Book and hold it in my hands. Inside the cover, fixed to the left flyleaf with a piece of tape, dry and brittle as a shed snake-skin, is a Teamster’s Union membership card dated 1946, with a black and white photo of a young black man, a younger version, I recognize, of the old man in Sunrise Hospital, his face slicked with optimism under a hat barely containing his oiled wave of black hair. The card identifies the man as CURTIS EDWARDS, his employer as the PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD, and his occupation, PORTER.

  Another piece of history slips out from beneath this one—a wallet-size photograph in color, one of those ubiquitous elementary school sittings that rose to popularity in the 1950s. This one’s of a boy, probably eight or ten, all grin, his adult-size teeth too big for his still child-size face, his dress shirt buttoned up to just below his adam’s apple, punctuated by a black bow tie. Across the bottom of the frame, as if to prove its mug shot origins, a black banner with white letters announces, ELKTON ELEM SCHOOL—ELKTON, VIRGINIA.

  Next to these two pieces of real evidence, lodged into the gutter of the Book, is a newspaper clipping, the color of toast, folded down the middle, and as I peel it open, carefully, the headline hits me,

  BODY OF PENNSYLVANIA MAN

  FOUND IN NATIONAL PARK.

  Don’t read this, races through my mind, Stop reading this, but my eyes, trained to a page for hours every day, speed over the words that say the body of a Pennsylvania man was discovered in the early morning hours of April 28 in Shenandoah National Park.

  The cause of death was apparent suicide.

  The body of the man, whose identity has not been revealed, pending notification of the surviving family, was discovered just after dawn yesterday by Mr. Curtis Edwards, a resident of Elkton.

  Mr. Edwards, an employee of Pennsylvania Railroad, discovered the body on National Park lands, near the road.

  Mr. Edwards, a porter on the transcontinental Pennsylvania Railroad train service, was driving home to surprise his son on his 10th birthday.

  “After I called the police, I went back and waited with the body ’til they came,” Mr. Edwards told this paper.

  “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

  Mr. Edwards and his family live in Elkton.

  I guess I’ve sat down on the bed because the next thing I realize Lester is crouching down in front of me asking, “Daughter—? Are you all right?”

  I hand him the news clipping and he reads, aloud, all over again, “Body of Pennsylvania man found in national park. The body of a Pennsylvania man was discovered in the early morning hours of April 28 in Shenandoah National Park. The cause of death was apparent suicide.” He seems to read the rest in silence, to himself, before he looks at me. “The ‘Pennsylvania man,’” he says. “—your father?”

  I nod, realizing, late, that he’s laid a healing hand on me.

  “Our guy stole my father’s wallet,” I say, my voice sounding, even to me, like a shadow of itself. “—why would he do that?—why would anybody do a thing like that?”

  Lester’s face lets me know that given who he is and where he comes from he doesn’t understand why people do the things they do, but that they do them, have done them and will continue to act beyond the range of decent social action and that their choices are a brutal fact of life in these united states and I must learn to live with them.

  There will be times—and places—for my outrage, but this isn’t one of them.

  “He had a son,” I say and pass the picture of the boy to him. “—has a son,” I correct myself, hoping to suggest that it’s my duty, now, to try to find him.

  Lester pats my knee and is about to say something when we hear the screen door slam, accompanied by a blast of angry language—is it Spanish?—from the living room.

  Lester’s on his feet, heading for the source. I hear a rapid, overlapping dialogue in two competing foreignnesses, one voice shouting at Lester in what I now recognize as Mexican Spanish and Lester speaking back in what I can only guess is Navajo.

  When I appear before the two of them, still clutching the Bible, the noise arrests. Then, in English, “—who are jou?—what are jou doin’ in thees house?—where’s Johnny?”

  A tiny woman weighing maybe ninety pounds, dressed in a cotton nightgown and a flannel robe, her hair still bedhead, sits in a motorized wheelchair, shoeless, one foot lividly discolored and the other one replaced by a pink prosthesis.

  With one hand she operates the joy
stick on her wheelchair, caroming back and forth in short, small spurts, threatening Lester with a cane that she wields with her other hand, jabbing at him, repeatedly, in the chest, as he backs up, hands above his head.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “—jo Mendoza.—jo landlady.—how did jou get in here?—where is Johnny?”

  “Miss Mendoza,” I explain, “My name is Marianne. My companion’s name is Lester…” Lester grabs the butt end of the threatening cane and just stops it. “…and yesterday Johnny…”(I have trouble speaking the false name): “…Johnny entered Lester’s place ofbusiness and had a heart attack.”

  Miss Mendoza bites her fist.

  “We let ourselves in—Lester, show her the keys—” He does. “—because we…”

  “—hees die?”

  “No.”

  “—hees hokay?”

  “He’s in Sunrise Hospital.”

  “—I tol’ heem: ‘Johnny, jou nee’ home-cook. Jou nee’ stop eatin’ these fry stuff. Hees, how jou call, high cholo-steeral…”

  “Would you like to see him?” Lester interrupts.

  Miss Mendoza nods.

  “We’ll take you,” Lester tells her.

  She looks at me clutching the Bible and asks, “Are jou from church?”

  Before I have a chance to answer she wheels around and heads out the door, saying, “I put dress on. Follow me.”

  Lester follows her, but I hold back, taking time to reexamine the display of Polaroids.

  Ever since my father’s death I’ve rehearsed a single version of how his body was discovered, how he was found, and now I try to re-create how and when that version entered my unchallenged memory.

  I think my mother must have told me.

  I think Mary must have told the version she remembered from the State Police. A milkman, she had said. A milkman had discovered him on his morning route through Shenandoah National Park, and for years I thought about that milkman in his milk truck on his milk route through the milky morning in the Park and how he must have felt coming on a body of a man hanging from a tree, the horror and the shock of it, and what he did that instant, if he got out of his truck right away or if he prayed and what he told his wife when he got home that night and if he had trouble falling asleep and if the image of my father gave him nightmares.

  I had always felt that different waves had radiated outward from my father’s death, one of them capsizing my mother, another overwhelming my sister and myself, still others touching on the lives of those who stood beneath him on that day and had to bring him down.

  I think of this each time there is a circumstance that calls for the retrieval of the dead, when crews go through the parishes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when crews tunnel through remains, encrypted under the twin towers. Once the dead have entered on the world that we inhabit, once they’re here, in front of us, how can we pretend that life and death do not exist in one continuum?

  Sometimes I wonder if the milkman quit his job that morning or took a long vacation, moved to another state or went back to work next day as if nothing extra-ordinary had happened.

  The degrees of separation between the milkman and myself were too few, and too intense, for me to ever exile him completely from my mind, but now, in light of what the story really was that April morning the milkman version seems a fairy tale and I’m surprised I never asked myself, Who the hell is there to get a milk delivery in a National Park, anyway? You, I almost say out loud, touching my finger to an image of Mr. Edwards in his doorman uniform, you’re the man that I’ve been looking for. And maybe if we’re lucky, you’ll recover from this incident, regain consciousness so we can talk.

  Because life just throws those miracles our way, doesn’t it?

  I take two Polaroids—the ones with Ann-Margret and Dean Martin—and slip them inside the Bible just as Lester presses his head against the screen outside and says, “You need to see this. Right away.”

  I follow him along the ramp to Miss Mendoza’s door, at which he steps aside to let me enter, and my initial response is, “What is this place?”

  A museum, it appears.

  The layout is the same as in the former house, but larger, the walls have been pushed back but the relative dimensions are identical. In the living room, to the left, low bookshelves skirt the perimeter, every inch of shelf space filled with artifacts—Kachina dolls, reed baskets, clay pipes, beaded bags, black and red clay pottery, drums, carved fetishes. They radiate an inner life, each one of them, and the temptation is to take each treasure in hand—to touch—which may explain why the only times I’ve seen such items on display there’s a protective pane of glass between me and their powerful attraction.

  On the floor and draped over the sofa are hand-woven rugs emblazoned in the geometric patterns of the Plains tribes, and in the center of the longest wall two beaded buckskin dresses hang from a carved pole festooned with leather fringe and feathers.

  But what captures my gaze is the array, on every wall, living room and dining room, of framed black-and-white and gold-toned photographs.

  These are Curtises, I breathe.

  Not gravures, which are as common as salt and cheap to manufacture, over-produced by galleries for the gullible at a couple hundred dollars a pop. No, these are originals, hand tinted prints from Curtis’s glass plates, worth—I’m guessing—tens of thousands of dollars each.

  Miss Mendoza zooms around the dining table, a coffee pot in hand, and tells us, “I don’ change a thin’ in here from time that I inherit”

  “—you inherited all this?”

  “This house, the one next door.”

  Lester draws the bracelet and the headdress from his shoulder bag and sets them on the table. “I believe these must belong to you.”

  She nods.

  “Every now an’ then I sen’ Johnny out to sell some thin’s. When I need money.”

  “My father made this bracelet,” Lester tells her. He shows her the jeweler’s mark that matches the twin one on his forearm.

  “Then jou mus’ keep it.”

  “Please, Miss Mendoza—”

  “—Clarita.”

  “Clarita. I don’t think you understand what this is worth.”

  “—plenty more where it comes from.”

  “But Miss Mendoza—” I begin.

  “—Clarita.”

  “Clarita. I’m no expert, but—”

  “—you’re sitting on a fortune,” Lester volunteers.

  “How did you—where did all this come from?” I ask her.

  “—was Tio Rico’s. With el jefe. They live here.”

  “—el jefe?”

  “Tio ’Uardo. They were, jou know, how jou say—?”

  She crosses two fingers of one hand in front of us.

  “—tight?” I guess.

  “—mens. Two mens. Tio Rico, hees my mother’s brother, she live over there, in the house I rent to Johnny. Her house, with me, after I am born. She cook an’ clean for thees house, an’ for all other house.” She draws a circle around the outside court with her outstretched hand. “She clean for all the boys.”

  “—the boys?”

  “Jou know—nightclub boys. Dancers. Very nice.”

  I look out the window at the gingerbread fronts of the little houses on the courtyard and reason this was quite the community, in its hey day.

  “But that doesn’t explain where all this—”

  “It was jefe’s. Tio ’Uardo’s.”

  “Ed-uardo?”

  “—si.”

  “Do you have a picture of this Eduardo?”

  She takes a scrapbook from the top drawer of the breakfront.

  “Help jourselve. Chicita in the picture, she is me. Beautiful lady—Lupe, madre mio. Handsome man—Enrico, tio. Other man in how jou say las gafas—glasses?—that one ees Eduardo.” She points the wheelchair toward the living room. “I go get dress.”

  She goes, and Lester and I page through the scrapbook. Someone kept it w
ith a persnickety archival diligence and an unintentional comic flair for writing. “The Lovely Lupe in Her Floral Apron with Carne Asada” reads the caption under one snapshot of an attractive young woman posing with a platter of food decades ago in this very dining room. “Enrico, El Toreador!” reads the quip beneath another picture of a handsome young Mexican man, shirtless, with a pair of garden shears outside this very house. There are pictures of groups of men assembled at an outdoor party in the court—pictures of what appear to be camping expeditions in the desert—pictures of a tent beside a stream where some sort of gold-extraction apparatus had been set up—pictures taken in the bare Nevada mountains—and then a picture whose caption reads, “Our First Gold Nugget,” where the handsome Mexican man holds a nugget of gold in his palm while he stares into the eyes of an older man in glasses, who stares back at him, adoringly. This is followed by a number of pictures taken through the years where the two men, never actually touching, pose in such a way, unguarded, that one, even after all these years, can hardly fail to sense their erotic charge nor fail to see that they’re in love.

  “—Curtis?” Lester asks.

  I nod.

  “‘The Missing Years,’” I can’t help saying, fondly.

  “You aren’t surprised?”

  “I might have guessed. But I never saw the evidence. These pictures were taken in the 1930’s, 40’s. Something must have changed between Edward and Enrico.”

  “Maybe Enrico died…”

  “…because in the late 40’s he went back to California to be with his four kids.”

  “Maybe he missed them.”

  “He had never missed them before.”

  I recall the photograph of Edward I had found where he’s posing with his children, the only one that I could find in which he’s halfway smiling. Beth is in an eye-popping apron, Florence in an artless off-the-rack frock, and only Katherine and Harold look as if they dressed expecting there might be someone with a camera present. Edward, out of character, looks disheveled, down at heel, as if his diminishing eyesight is finally taking its toll on his ability to see a bright horizon. This is us when we are happy the photograph is meant to say. But when I think of Edward in that picture, I have to say I’m not convinced.