Died in the Wool

by Rett MacPherson

  “Are you saying that … her brothers … loved her? Were in love with her? Like in the biblical sense?” I asked, hysteria rising in my voice. It couldn’t be true. It made sense, it would make everything make sense, but it just couldn’t be true.

  “I’m saying that my mother said that her brothers—I can’t remember their names—fought for her attention. The older one couldn’t stand it that the younger one got the attention because he had been to war, so he’d try to get his sister’s attention in other ways.”

  Hazel left Whalen right after Sophie was born. Was that why? Because she sensed or maybe even discovered that Whalen was in love with his sister? It would sure as hell be enough reason for me to leave, if I’d been in her shoes, and like her, I would have taken my daughter and most likely would have tried to keep her from him. They didn’t have “joint custody” back then. If Whalen had wanted Sophie, he would have gotten her. How horrible to find out your husband was in love with another woman, especially when the other woman was his sister!

  Could this be the Big Thing? The big secret that all of this was wrapped up in?

  It hadn’t even occurred to me—most likely because, at the core of it all, I still expect the best from people, not the worst. I’m not sure if that makes me pathetically naive or the last of a dying breed. Maybe both.

  “Listen, Judy, do you remember ever hearing anything about Whalen’s wife? Whalen was the older brother. His wife, Hazel, left him. Does any of this ring a bell with you?”

  “You know, I don’t remember names,” she said, and it’s all pretty vague. I just remember the things my mother was the most adamant about. I do recall her mentioning that one of the boys had a wife and that she’d disappeared. That’s all I remember about it, though. Marty would be the one you should ask.”

  Of course! When I talked to Marty, I’d been so wrapped up in the Glory/Anthony love story that I’d completely forgotten to mention Hazel. I guess at the time I hadn’t seen how that would actually have affected Glory. If what Judy said was right, it could shed some light on why Hazel had left. Of course, like so much family history, this was just one woman’s secondhand knowledge.

  Judy’s phone rang then. She went into the kitchen to answer it, was gone a few moments, and then came back into the living room. “It’s Marty Tarullo’s daughter,” she said. “He’s had a stroke. He’s asking to speak to you.”

  “To me?” I asked, shocked.

  “He’s at Wisteria General,” she said. “I’ll drive you.”

  Twenty

  Marty Tarullo had slipped in and out of conciousness for the five hours that I was at Wisteria General. I made a phone call to Professor Whitaker, and he said that the team would be back the next day, too. Emilia was hard at work on restoring the original drawing of the monster character in the mural. How she was doing this I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to see what was beneath the current drawing. Finally, I’d had Rudy come pick me up and take me to my car at Judy’s house. I’d asked the hospital to call me when Marty came to. I had no idea what he wanted to tell me, but in case it was something that could blow this whole Kendall family mystery wide open, I sure as heck wasn’t going to sit on my hands. If he wanted to talk to me, by golly, I’d be there. I followed Rudy home with my mind feeling like it was expanding, pushing out of my ears and eye sockets until I thought my head would explode. I know that expanding your mind is supposed to be a good thing, but I would have argued that point right then.

  When I got home, I made a list of things to do to prepare for the Strawberry Festival coming up in June. Then I vacuumed all the floors. I vacuumed the living room floor three times. Not because it needed it, but just because I forgot that I’d already done it and did it again. Finally, when I was about ready to start the vacuum for the fourth time, Rudy threatened to make me go live in the stables. That would have been bad, so I put away the vacuum.

  I decided to walk out to the stables and see the horses that Rudy had threatened me with. I hadn’t given them very much attention since this whole Kendall thing had started. I wanted to spend an evening just doing nothing and not thinking about the Kendalls. It was scary how I could immerse myself in somebody else’s family so completely that I started to feel betrayed when they didn’t behave like I thought they should, hurt when tragedy ultimately struck, and stumped when I didn’t understand their motivation.

  I love to hear horses breathe. That may sound strange, but nobody ever said that I was normal. In fact, my own mother has never said it, and my daughters routinely call me “weird” or “unusual.” I walked through the stable, listening to the horses breathe and the crickets rub their legs together and the owl in the distance ask, “Who?”

  When the temperature felt as though it had dropped below sixty, I headed back into the house. I took a book off the shelf in the living room and started to read. I fell asleep there and was awakened by Rudy kissing my forehead the next morning.

  Wow, horses must be magic. I slept really soundly and had not thought of the Kendalls at all. Not until this very moment when I woke up. I’m pretty predictable, huh?

  Rudy took Matthew to my mother’s, and I saw to it that Mary didn’t go to school with black lipstick on. Then I headed up to my bathroom. Just as I stepped out of the shower, my phone rang.

  It was Judy Pipkin. “Torie, he’s awake. If you want to see him, you should probably get here fast. I can’t say how long he’s going to be lucid, and I don’t think he’ll last through the day.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said.

  * * *

  I hate visiting the terminally ill, and without a miracle, Marty Tarullo was not long for this world. I want people to be either alive or dead. That whole hanging on in a world that no longer has a place for you … it’s just horrible. I suppose one good thing could come of it, if you’re inclined to take advantage of it. It could give you a chance to say things to the people you need to say things to, before diving off into the wild blue yonder.

  Marty Tarullo was doing just that. Not only had he requested to speak to me, but he was surrounded by his family. He’d been saying the things he needed to say. I have respect for that. His family will cherish his last words in the years to come. His hospital room was not cheery in the least. Nobody’d had the chance to bring in colorful balloons with cutesy sayings on them or vases full of fragrant flowers. But his family was here, and that was the most important thing.

  When I walked in, I felt like I was interrupting. Well, I was. These were his last moments with his family, yet he’d chosen to give a few of these moments to me. His family had to give up precious time that they would never get back to allow him to talk to a relative stranger. Connie recognized me when I entered the room. She smiled and said to her father, “Dad, Torie O’Shea is here.”

  His eyes wandered around a bit until his gaze landed firmly on me. I gave a slight wave and walked over to his bedside. There must have been seven or eight people in the room. They all smiled at me and nodded.

  The milky white lights did nothing to make Marty look any less close to death than he was. In fact, they made him look as though he’d already passed on. If it had been my father lying there, I’d have opened the window. My father loves the sun on his face and the smell of the outdoors, and I couldn’t take him looking like this. Maybe it had been too distracting for Marty.

  “Hi, Mr. Tarullo,” I said in a quiet voice. It still sounded loud.

  “Missus O’Shea,” he said, and grabbed my hand. His hand was soft and cool. His voice came out almost a whisper. “I wanted to ask a favor of you.”

  I glanced around the room, uncertain what he was about to ask. “If I can do it, I will.”

  “Would you…” He took a deep breath. “Would you continue putting flowers on Glory Anne’s grave for me? Once I’m gone, everyone will forget.”

  A sniffle came from somewhere in the room, and I have to admit, a lump bulged in the back of my throat. I barely knew the man, but his devotion was
utterly heartbreaking. Even on his deathbed, he could not forget the woman who was Glory Anne Kendall. Really, he couldn’t forget his brother, either, because this tradition of putting flowers on Glory’s grave was for his brother.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Every June,” he instructed.

  “Every June,” I repeated.

  His grip loosened and his hand fell limply to his chest. Instinctively I checked to see if he was still breathing, and he was. No monitors went off, and his chest rose every few seconds. The brief exchange with me had worn him out. I looked to his daughter, who was dabbing her eyes. “I don’t understand,” I said. “He could have just asked any one of you to ask me for this favor. Why did he want me here?”

  “Because he wanted to see your face when you answered. He wanted to know whether or not you were sincere,” she said. “He hated telephones for that reason. He said you couldn’t really tell what people were thinking unless they were right in front of you.”

  It made sense to me, and I was deeply honored that he chose me to carry on this tradition. “What are the doctors saying?” I asked.

  “His heart is giving out,” she said. “He’ll go into a coma before long, and he’ll just slip away.”

  I said my apologies to her and decided that I’d intruded enough. I backed out of the door silently and headed for Fraulein Krista’s for a hot fudge sundae.

  Okay, so I eat when I’m sad. So what? I’ve been doing it for almost forty years and it’s never failed to make me feel … less hungry. At the end of the sundae, I was still sad, but the sundae had been good, and that was something. Right?

  Sitting there at the table in my favorite restaurant in town, steeped in Bavarian polka music and the smells of sauerkraut and bratwurst, I came to a startling conclusion. I hate loose ends. I hate ambiguity. I hate random acts. I hate misrepresentation. I hate it when people such as the Kendalls had shown themselves one way to the public, when they were something else entirely in private. I mean, I know all families have their “public faces” and their “private faces,” but the Kendalls lived double lives. When does that start to become a problem? When does that double life start to eat away at a person and cause him or her to start breaking down?

  I have a cousin who has a lot of the same childhood memories that I have because we spent a ton of time together. When you hear her recall these memories, and then you hear me tell the same stories, they are very different. I remember my grandparents’ farm as a lot of fun, but not all fun. Every magical stroll through the berry patch that I took, I got chased by bumblebees half the time. Although the baby chickens were cute, I sat in chicken poop more often than not. Yes, Grandma taught me about making strawberry jam, and Grandpa would sit on the porch and play the violin, but a great deal of the time I sat around wishing to God they got more than three black-and-white channels on their TV. But to hear my cousin talk, well, the place was akin to Shangri-la, a mystical place that couldn’t exist. There were never any bad moments, like having five ticks at one time on your back sucking the life out of you, or ripping your pants out in a mudslide and having to have six stitches in a very delicate place. No, none of those things ever happened.

  When could a person’s memory really be trusted? Was Marty Tarullo remembering a love between Anthony and Glory that wasn’t real? That had been made romantic by time? Was Judy Pipkin’s mother’s memory correct? Or was she maybe a little jealous of the attention that Glory got? Had her memory of what happened become tainted with green? Or was her memory really the memories of her mother that she’d adopted as her own? I just couldn’t be sure.

  The most disturbing part of this whole existential epiphany that I was having in the most unlikely of places was that Colin was right. I couldn’t go public with “theories” because then the public would start to come up with their own incorrect “memories” of what happened. I had to go public with facts or nothing. Right now all I had to give the public was the very things I hated. Random acts, misrepresentation, loose ends, and ambiguity.

  Can I just say that I’m so happy that Colin wasn’t anywhere around at this moment of weakness or I might have actually told him these things.

  Then I got the phone call I’d been waiting for. It was Professor Whitaker. “Torie, you need to come up to my office. Emilia did this thing on her computer. She took pictures first with some digital whatchamacallit … Hell, I dunno, but anyway, she’s been able to erase certain lines of the drawing, and I think she’s got the face beneath the monster.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  * * *

  I called Rudy to let him know that I might be late. The college is almost two hours from New Kassel, and I didn’t know how long I’d be there, so I wasn’t sure when I would get home.

  At one time southeast Missouri, like St. Louis, had been almost all French. You can still find a lot of French influence there, if nothing else in the last names in the white pages and the number of Catholic churches. In St. Louis, the French dominance is all but gone save for a few place names like Chouteau Avenue and a few sculptures like the one of Saint Louis at the art museum. The Irish, the Germans, and eventually the Italians came in and all but squashed the French.

  West of St. Louis, along the Missouri River valley, was where the Germans mostly settled, followed by a good contingent of Irish, and it has remained remarkably German. The area I am in has been called the Little Rhineland, and with all the excellent wineries that have popped up to dot the Missouri River almost all the way to Jefferson City, the title isn’t far from correct.

  Nestled in this amazing green, rolling countryside, Oldham College sat stoically on a hillside, facing south. In front of the building that houses the history department was a man-made pond filled with Canada geese and mallard ducks, all swimming, oblivious to my presence. Professor Whitaker was with a class when I arrived, and I had to wait fifteen minutes until he was finished. Then he led me down a hall, up a flight of stairs, and around a corner to Emilia’s office. I could barely contain my excitement. Anticipation flowered in my chest as we entered the room where her computer sat with the monster face pulled up on the screen.

  “Hi, Torie,” she said. “I have to tell you, I’ve had a lot of fun doing this. I wasn’t sure I’d find an image quite so clear, but here you go.”

  She pushed some buttons and explained what she’d done to obtain this image. Computer jargon. Me not understand computer speak. I just push buttons on a computer and things happen. When they don’t, I call Rudy. When Rudy can’t fix it, I call Rachel. If Rachel can’t fix it, then we need serious help.

  None of that mattered. Because when the computer was finished doing whatever it was it was doing … there was a face. Not a monster face, but a human face.

  “Torie, are you all right?” Professor Whitaker asked.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you just turned white,” Emilia said.

  “You’re positive this is right?” I asked, feeling light-headed.

  “Pretty dang close,” Emilia said.

  “Why, who is it?” Professor Whitaker asked.

  “It’s Sandy Kendall. Her father.”

  “Is that bad or good?” Emilia asked.

  “It’s not good.”

  Twenty-one

  I’d asked Emilia to find the human face under the monster face, but I thought she’d just uncovered the real monster. She printed a copy of the image for me. I thanked them both and left for home. I was in such a hurry to tell somebody what I had discovered that I just began making phone calls on my cell phone to whoever would listen. The first person I got was my sister, then Rudy. Then I called Colin and Mort, and neither of them answered any of their phones.

  I arrived back in New Kassel around three in the afternoon and went to my office. Stephanie had left about a half hour before. I booted up my computer and then went to the kitchen for a Dr Pepper. The first drink was heaven. All that carbonation bubbling down my throat made me as happy as I could be, even i
f it was short-lived. The second drink was never as good as the first.

  I went back to my office and pulled up what my old boss, Sylvia, had accumulated on the Kendall family. Many years ago Sylvia and her sister, Wilma, had decided to gather five-generation charts and family group charts on the people of New Kassel. They deposited them in the historical society so that people who wanted to trace their ancestry to this tiny town could find the information. I had spent many hours entering the handwritten documents into the computer, but I hadn’t been alone. Helen had done some of it, Elmer had helped out, and on occasion even Sylvia had pitched in. Sylvia may have been a cold and cantankerous old bat, but she was light-years ahead of most of her generation, and she hadn’t been afraid of change.

  On more than one occasion these family group sheets and generation charts have helped me. On hundreds of occasions they have helped others connect the dots. At times, Sylvia had supplemented things she knew to be true with assumptions and her own memories. Those were the things I had to be careful of, because sometimes she could be a bit prejudiced. So I tried to keep this in mind when I looked up the charts on the Kendall family. I couldn’t imagine that there wouldn’t be information on them.

  Sandy Kendall’s five-generation chart indeed showed his ancestors back five generations, except on two branches for which Sylvia only had three generations documented. It was a pretty typical family tree of the “second boat” type. He most likely had no ancestors from the Mayflower, the first boat, but some lines of his family had been in the country since the 1630s or 1640s; thus they were part of the immigration wave known as the second boat. Mostly his family was from Virginia and Pennsylvania, with one line from Connecticut. Then I checked the family group sheets, which are a record of each person’s family: who the individual married, children, and vital information, like occupation, place of burial, and birth and death dates.

  Under Sandy Kendall’s group sheet, Sylvia had written an addendum. Another page of nothing but notes. As I suspected, it was all about the suicides. As I had also suspected, Sylvia had known the family personally. She mentioned newspaper after newspaper coming to town to interview witnesses. Then in late 1993 she made just this one note: