And the name Dorothy. Wasn’t that simple? Was she named, after all, after Oz?
Simpletons!
But yet, there she was, Dorothy Krause, with the invisible maiden name. Invisible life. What had she been before she had been . . . his?
His thoughts raced imagining her then, way back then. He did not want to, would not let himself think, count, calculate, how long ago it actually was. He would not add it up.
It dangled right there, right beyond, the edges of what he would and would not think. A thought-not-thought. A word not spoken.
Much like the fleeting glimpse, the don’t-allow-yourself-to-think-it image of her daughter draped down dead in the snow. No, no, keep that for someone else to think. Throw it out the back screen door and give it to the sparrows.
No one could hurt her now at least.
SIX
The first week was a bore, unbearable. No snow on the ground, but it was ice-bite, see-your-breath cold. There was no escape. Muskegon, 1952. Trapped there, in the gray, ash landscape, stuck. So far away from the Downbeat Club, the Three Deuces, and Sardi’s. She thought she might die. Or, maybe, make herself die, it wasn’t that difficult. If she had to, she’d do it. What was all the fuss? And where were all the cocktails? That was the real question.
Weekend excursions, past the still glass lake, Highway 94, over to Chicago. He tried to keep her happy. Nights at Palmer House, fireworks off Navy Pier, games at Wrigley, dinners at the Drake. But, cut to the chase. It was no New York. It was not New York and he was not Edward.
Again, she wondered what had become of him, where had he fallen. Maybe he was still in New York, or maybe Paris, London, knowing him. He could not stay put long. Fancied himself a world traveler. Coming back from Paris, Rome, Venice, he’d put a magnet on his refrigerator, a different magnet, bought on a lark, but a specific lark, from a silly funny gift shop. These Edward would bring home and place lovingly on his fridge in his kicky impress-you apartment on Fifth Avenue. This magnet fridge of trinkets, a cocktail-party conversation piece, a few witticisms in the kitchen, fetching ice. A way of saying, “I’ve been farther than you. I’ve been around the world. And I will leave you.”
Thinking about those days, weeks, months after he’d slaughtered her in the heart, Dotsy was relieved, grateful to feel nothing. If I can only feel nothing, for the rest of my life, I’ll be lucky. Knowing now, thinking it over, what a fool she’d been, a fool for love as they say. Of all the captains of industry, steel magnates, robber-baron sons, war profiteers, of all the bigwigs, postwar moguls and masters of the universe, she’d chosen this one—this losing proposition, this bon vivant, this dilettante. This Edward. If she’d only thought it out, she’d be in a penthouse overlooking the park, not some ranch house in Muskegon, Michigan. But she hadn’t thought it out, had she? It had simply run its course.
Even so, she didn’t let herself resent her husband. It wasn’t Charles’s fault. She knew, staring at him rolled silent in his sleep, she knew she was lucky to have him. A good man. Improbable as it was to her, despite her hungover days and nights of spiraling, blitzkrieg intoxication—she’d somehow managed to find a good man. A solid man. A man with his head on his shoulders.
Yes, she knew, in passing, the days he’d spent after the war, before he met her . . . she knew those D-Day stripes and that save-the-world uniform earned him a special reward, a girl reward, and she knew he took it. In spades.
Strange, how that reassured her. Yes, he is bad, too. He can be bad, too. Like me. Dotsy knew she was a hundred percent pure bad person in disguise. It was clear to her. And when Edward gave her the high hat, it was confirmed. Of course he didn’t love me, I’m just a yokel from Odessa, Texas. Loving me would be a humiliation, really. I am a step down. I am a step away from the social register, the Knickerbocker Club, this blue-blood aristocracy and all the things he holds dear.
Still, it cut her in two she’d been so stupid to think it, to fall for him. She should’ve seen the signs. For instance, what did he “do” exactly? Well, nothing. He was one of the great nothing-doers of New York, a long-held tradition, one to uphold—and he upheld it, martini in hand. What was he really? A dandy. An aesthete. Feckless as the waves lapping the East Egg sound. Christ, she’d never even seen him eat a steak! No, the signs were all there, right from the start, but had she heeded them? No, sir, she’d let herself fall straight in love with this nothing man. This sometime vegetarian. This Hudson scarecrow. This New York “man.” A breed grown nowhere else in America. Witty in conversation. Always. Articulate. Check. Well dressed. Well, that goes without saying. On the most polite side of politics but ask him in private, he’s quite progressive. Yes, another heartless revolutionary. So kind to those he’s never met and cruel to those who loved him.
She hated him.
Disgusted at herself for allowing it to happen. How could she? She was a steadfast girl from Texas, as constant as cactus. She was smarter than that. It’s not like she was some lily-lilted girl from Charleston. Some wallflower from Charlotte. The whole thing, as far as she was concerned, was a magic trick.
And then, ten months after she married Charles, came baby. The three months of puking her face off in the toilet, the three months of walking on air, sex fever. The three months of walrus waddling around the house and wanting to say fuck you to the postman. The conked-out birth—she wanted it that way. After nine months of sobriety, she practically grabbed the needle out the doctor’s hands and gave the injection herself. Shut it off! Shut off my brain! I’m sick of myself! Waking up in that sterile mint hospital room, Lt. Colonel Charles at her side, a face full of hope, had he been crying? And a so-small tiny baby girl. A gorgeous little pie-face with white hair and saucer blue eyes. A towhead. Elizabeth. My little Beth. We can call her Lizzy or Betsy or Betty. Maybe Betsy. Betsy and Dotsy. My little own baby girl. A drug made of love coursing through her brain, her heart, her veins.
No, after that, she couldn’t have picked out Edward from a lineup of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. He had disappeared, somehow. The space in her memory taken up, knocked out, bulled over for new space. Baby space. Love-for-baby-girl space. And now Edward was nothing more than a question mark. Who? Oh . . . him . . . right. Yes. I remember. Kind of.
Like an early child memory before three, there it goes. Gone for good. And suddenly it was like it had never happened. Not cured, exactly. Just never was. Erased.
But, she’d heard something, something not entirely insubstantial, from her girlfriends back at Sardi’s. He’d not come to much. He’d never managed to get the airplane off the ground, so to speak. They said, to her disguised delight, “He’s gotten older. You wouldn’t recognize him, Dots.”
And Dotsy would pretend this was never-care news, weather news, sports-team news. “And the other thing, Dots. You’ll never believe it. He’s asked about you. All the girls . . . Ethel, Irene, Rita, too. In whispers, late night. Asked about you and your husband. How could you leave?”
Dotsy stiffing up now, baby cooing up from her basket, little basket on the table, swaddled in pink. A love bug. A snug little bean. “Dotsy, he gets shit-faced and asks about you. I swear. You wouldn’t recognize him. He’s lost it. Whatever it was, I swear, he lost it.”
And Dorothy Krause wishing she were the kind of person who could transcend idle gossip, wishing she were the angel-face she knew she was supposed to be, couldn’t help, upon putting down the receiver, click, looking down at her pink baby towhead swaddled and big-eyed and pudgy, couldn’t help but think, a selfish little greedy greedy thought, a thought she shouldn’t allow herself, a slaying thought.
Ha. I won.
SEVEN
How stupid they found themselves. Disgusting. Thinking about those moments before they had met the Krauses, or then . . . the victim’s parents. It had meant nothing to them. Names on a paper, nothing more.
And now, they couldn’t bear to look at each other. Never mentioned it, not even in passing. Danek at Katy, Brad at Lars, Lars at Danek. Kno
wing that six months earlier they had actually contrived . . . a trap. A trap for the Krauses! They would make them cry on camera! Now that would make the documentary.
But that was before.
And now . . . half a year later, sitting in the unassuming, well-appointed blue, a sitting room neat as a pleat, across from Lt. Colonel Charles and his fair wife, Dorothy . . . they might as well have stapled their belly buttons to their spines. Rot gut. A blushing guilt.
There she was, offering cookies or tea or maybe a sandwich. There he was, the crewcut haircut now gray, the black-and-white soldier photographs framed behind resting on the nook. The blue-and-green curtains, the doilies on the side table, spick-and-span, the sepia wedding photograph on the mantel, the kind words . . .
No, there would be no crying today. In fact, there would be no crying at all. No dramatics.
They were not dramatic people, the Krauses. No, the opposite. There was an effortless grace. In her ivory sweater set and onyx hair . . . there was a quiet resilience that condemned even as it enthralled.
They would not break down. There would be no Jerry Springer moment, no taking out their baby’s old tokens and weeping, no references to “before the accident.”
They were matter-of-fact. They were transcendent. They were everything that Danek, Lars, Brad, and Katy were not. They were the old time. The old way. The Greatest Generation.
It wasn’t until leaving, after the third afternoon of filming, walking down the walkway, gliding past the white picket fence and into the horrible now, that Danek had ever truly realized the meaning of the expression.
The Greatest Generation.
(There will never be another.)
It was a drive due east, past the Hampton Inn, to get to Shauna. It was a drive where there were a million things to say but better not say them. Brad mentioned something about the Packers, met with a dull nod.
They had known they were young but they had not known they were foolish. Until now. They would not forget it. They would make it up to the Krauses. This imaginary crime. They had wanted to take advantage of them. Yes, it was before they knew them. Yes. But that had been their motive. To make them cry. To stir up drama. To get a good grade. The thought now, a lump in the throat.
Pulling up to the curb, the apartment complex, apologizing from the pavement.
And inside . . . look here, Shauna Boggs.
There she sits, must be sitting anyway, in the living room slash dining room slash . . . bedroom? What exactly is this place? This crappy little shit-hole in the middle of town yet not here. You would walk past it and never know it was here. Seeing it and not seeing it at the same time. A bland oasis.
Beige, what is it, stucco? Or a form of stucco? Faux stucco? An apartment complex built in the ’70s, maybe late ’60s. Tame as a Twinkie.
And there she sits, three-hundred-pound Shauna Boggs with her not-blonde, not-brown hair, somehow greasy at the scalp and dry at the ends. A cautionary tale in split ends.
She is wearing a sweatshirt. With a dog on it. The dog stares plaintively from her gloppy, overflowing chest. Below that, jeans, stretch jeans with an elastic waist. Shmoo jeans. Shmoo sweatshirt. Shmoo look. Her skin, a lightless sort of beige. A paste. Her eyes, swallowed by her cheeks. Her mouth, thin and dry and blending backward into her face.
From her: dramatics.
As difficult as it was, the students, to see themselves, to be themselves, at the Lt. Colonel’s house, here they were like kings. Although she didn’t offer them anything. More like she sat and waited, waited for what . . . them to like her? Them to accept her. Them to tell her she was there.
How could they turn off the camera when . . . when behind her there is a sink full of dishes, sideways on a slant, and at her feet is a cat toy and she has the kitty litter right under the table. No, it was too good. Keep the camera running. Let’s get this.
And the tears. The blubbering. Slobby, sniveling tears into the Kleenex and the snot, too. A lesson in Americanism. Now. Hysterics. Drama in a stucco complex. Sadness the depth of a cereal box.
So, there she is, for all to see, forever, sobbing into the camera, saying, “I just . . . I just can’t understand who would do such a thing. . . . And how . . . even now . . . after all these years . . . they could live with themselves.” Snivel. Blow nose. Blot face.
“I know I couldn’t.”
EIGHT
The motel clerk who’d hired Beth all those centuries ago had a taut stretched face from smoking and stretching and smoking and stretching her skin. Pull pull pulling it tight tight and over her ears, sewing it, bolting it down. It seems she’d hit it big, this banana-haired lady, married an auto exec, moved to Bloomfield Hills. Those coupon days back in Muskegon, a thing of never-talking, a thing of leave-behind.
Here, at the Radisson Lobby Bar in Bloomfield Hills, you would not believe she had been the one to actually hire Beth. But Danek and Katy had driven out here, three hours, to get it right.
It wasn’t drinking time but black roots was having a drink. The white wine spritzer set down before her at the lobby bar, guilty, on the tiny circle table, had prompted her.
“It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
Danek and Katy had smiled politely, not wanting to seem snooty, wanting to take off this college kid armor, leave it at coat-check, don it later. Now we are investigators. Now we are friends.
Danek had typed up the list of questions. Katy would ask them, of course, she’d be better. Put the lady at ease. Girl talk.
“Do you remember the afternoon you hired Beth Krause? At the Green Mill Inn?”
“Barely. Honestly, look. It’s been awhile.”
Staring nervously into the camera. How do I look? Fluffing up her hair. Danek behind the camera . . . fine . . . you look fine. Great even. Don’t change a thing. Just try to focus on the questions. Try to remember.
“Even just a small thing?”
“Well, I . . . I remember she seemed kind of out of place, you know? She seemed kind of like . . . well, I was thinking, What do you want this shit-ass job for? A pretty girl like you.”
Katy laughed with her, a casual we’re-in-it-together laugh. Keep her happy. Keep her comfortable.
“I guess I worked there, so why not, right? I wasn’t that bad to look at. Not then anyway.”
“Oh, c’mon, you look great, are you kidding?”
Keep her cozy. All is well.
She shrugs now, “A shitty job’s a shitty job, you know. No matter how you slice it.”
“That is for sure. I’ve had my fair share.”
A lie, of course. Katy had never had a job, other than babysitting her cousin over summers in Saginaw. A family job. A job to say you’ve had a job. Teach the value of a dollar. But not really. Not a crapsicle french fry job, not a frazzle-brain, answer-twelve-phone-lines front desk job. A kid job, no danger of an accidental brush with humanity. That cement block future of toil.
“You have?” Blondie looks relieved. We’re peers. “Oh good. Well, that’s what this was.”
“And what did it entail?”
Danek behind the camera, Danek thinking about ordering a drink. Maybe a gin and tonic. Maybe a Pimm’s. No, too summery. Maybe a whiskey and Coke. Maybe one for Katy, too. That might work.
“You know, we had to check people in, check ’em out. Simple stuff.”
The tiny circle table gets emptied. A replacement drink gets set down. No questions asked. Guess she’s a regular.
“Was there ever any weird people coming through? When you were there? Anyone you’d suspect?”
Slurp. Clink.
“Well, you know, we had some odd ones, yes. But mostly it was the groups I hated. We had a few Hells Angels. Real rowdy, you know?”
“Hells Angels?”
“Oh yeah. Biker guys. All in leather. And some union guys. Sometimes there’d be some hubbub down at the plants . . . next thing you know we’d be checking in the union guys.”
“What about a lone individual? Did you eve
r check in someone you thought, ‘Oh no, hide my purse!’”
Katy smiles. Reach out to them. Make them feel like you are gonna be best friends for sure.
“Look, there were some creeps. I’m not gonna lie. One guy even offered me five hundred bucks to go up to his room. Just to watch him . . . you know. A real normal-looking guy, too. I’m not kidding.”
“Really?
“Oh, yeah. And there was this one guy asked if I would . . . uh, forget it.”
“No, c’mon, I have to know now.”
“Okay, well, there was this one guy, wanted me to come up and call him names, like call him a baby, and he’d put on diapers and shake a rattle and stuff. Offered me three hundred dollars. Said that was it . . . that was all I had to do.”
“Wow. Did you do it?”
“Hell, no! I mean, sure, sounds like easy money but . . . you never know.”
“Unbelievable.”
“I know! But, you know, it was mostly people traveling through, families on a budget, you know. In summers, lots of fishing. Peak season. The rest of the year, well, we had some husbands, getting their rocks off, on the side. They’d pay for the night, be gone by twelve.”
“But no one in particular, maybe a regular?”
“Not really. Creeps are creeps, you know.”
A giant diamond ring on her finger, single setting on a spray-tan hand. Must be at least ten grand. Right there, in sparkles. Ice on her hand, ice in the glass. Clink clink clink.
“And Beth? Do you remember anything particular about her? Anything odd that mighta stuck.”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t say but . . . she seemed. . . . It was weird. I felt like, she seemed frail somehow. Like, she couldn’t remember anything, you know. She couldn’t even remember her own name.”
Slurp. Swivel the ice.
“I remember thinking . . . this poor kid. Man, she has no idea.”
Clink.
“I mean, she is in for it.”
NINE
Shot in his arm, one shot in his side, he’d been lucky. No vital organs. Just barely. The randomness of fate, a broken weather vane, careening in the wind.
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