“They all live northeast of Chattanooga in Tennessee,” Shannon said on that February 2014 call, with triumph in her voice.
I asked what she meant by “all,” and she told me that Suzanne, her daughter, Louisa, and Louisa’s husband, all lived on a farm, with Suzanne’s son David a couple of towns away. How could it be possible that I too had lived in Tennessee, for fifteen years before moving to New York, and didn’t even know they were in the same state? Had they been there a long time?
Shannon didn’t know. She gave me their phone number. I had spent many weekends at my uncle’s house while I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, so I had more familiarity with Suzanne’s family.
“Dorothy, call them. We have to find out what really happened,” Shannon said with an urgency in her voice I had never heard before. Here was reality giving us its own selfie. After talking about Suzanne’s family for decades, we finally had the opportunity to see them. Moving from theory to practice was daunting. My heart beat fast as my stomach churned around as if I had just jumped off a whirling carousel.
“Okay,” I said with a mix of trepidation and exultation, “I’ll fly to Tennessee and drive the four hours to go see them.”
“I can’t ask you to do that,” Shannon said.
“Someone has to find out, in person, what happened.”
“But it’s dangerous.”
“They haven’t done anything in, what, forty years?”
“That we know of,” she said again, soberly. “And don’t forget, one of them murdered my father.”
But which one? That was the mystery to solve. Shannon agreed. We both desperately wanted to know.
“I am the only person in the entire world who can go to that family and ask questions. There’s nobody outside of our family who cares much about getting answers, and I’m the only one of us who spent endless weekends at the house in Oregon with your father and Suzanne and the kids, and I’m the only one who had contact with her after the shooting.”
And by “the shooting,” I meant what happened March 1, 1970, when Suzanne—or was it David?—murdered Vernie shortly after 2:00 A.M. Just like everyone old enough remembers where they were when President Kennedy was shot, I remember that day quite precisely.
* * *
That Sunday morning I was asleep at my grandmother’s house in Beloit, Wisconsin, visiting from college in Madison. Around 5:30 A.M. there was a loud knocking on the front door. At first, I thought it was part of a dream. After all, it was a surreal time between the darkest night and the first light of dawn. I stumbled out of bed, hugging my arms tight to keep warm as I went to the door. Was that my mother and uncle standing outside? Or was I in that winter hallucination that can overcome even the hardiest soul in such arctic weather? If I had been more alert, I might have noticed the wad of tissue stuffed in my mother’s hand and how she was biting her bottom lip.
When I think back to that day, I remember my tall and substantial mother being dressed in her church clothes and hat, but now I realize how memory can cloud reality. Because they had to drive the 62.7 miles over icy roads, she couldn’t possibly have taken time for such elegance. She must have been wearing her brown slacks, worn at the knees, navy wool overcoat, which was two sizes too big from when she lost the weight, and her beige knit scarf, which was starting to pill. As a younger man, my uncle had been lanky, with blond hair, but now in his forties had more girth and gray hair. His eyes were narrow. My mother’s were puffy and red, with her hair not combed, but sticking out in bunches in a short roller cut. They quietly marched across the linoleumed floor into the kitchen and sat down at the round maple table covered with red-gingham oilcloth. By this time my grandmother was up. It was clear looking at her and her children that my grandfather must have towered over her, as she was so much shorter than her offspring. She sat down on one of the four captain’s chairs and looked expectantly at her children. This wasn’t the first time she’d had bad news, so she was prepared.
“Vernie’s gone,” Mama blurted out as she let go with a gush of tears. My uncle was crying, too, a hankie to his eyes. I don’t think I’d ever seen him cry before. Not this retired army sergeant who’d traveled the world working on important international assignments. Grandma just sat there in her robin-blue robe and slippers, staring out through the kitchen door to the covered porch, her white hair matted down from sleep.
My grandmother was seventy-seven years old. She had left Norway at age fifteen to make a new life in America and had never seen her own mother again. Her father had died before she was born. Now there was more loss. This was the third of five children dead, plus her husband and a grandson. I’ve had many years to wonder how she held up through all of that grief.
Her only remaining son took a break from his tears and continued. “Vernie and Suzanne were out drinking. Fighting in the bar. They got home and—the sheriff said—Suzanne shot him at two this morning.” Because Uncle Vernie had been a police officer before the scandal, he kept guns around.
“His birthday was just last week. Forty-four,” Grandma said quietly. She had found her voice. “Never shoulda married that tramp.” Grandma got up and automatically walked toward the counter to make coffee for everyone. “I told Jenylle [his first wife], ‘Don’t give him a divorce. You’ve got Shannon to think about. He’ll get tired of Suzanne and come back around.’ Instead, he married that lowlife and started drinking himself to death.” Such was the narrative I had heard many times in the past seven years, during which time Uncle Vernie had resigned in disgrace as Captain following his affair with Suzanne, who’d already had three husbands and three divorces.
I remembered the many weekends Uncle Vernie insisted I visit them, which were more frequent that first year of college, from 1966 to 1967. He’d pick me up in Madison and drive me the thirty minutes to Oregon to spend time with the family, which included Suzanne’s three children. He and Suzanne drank like dehydrated desert inhabitants. My family had a lot of alcoholics, people who needed piped-in beer as accessible as city water, so I was accustomed to excessive alcohol consumption. But even I thought Vernie and Suzanne were extreme. Then they’d fight loudly with name-calling and arguments, but afterward make up with the same intensity with which they’d fought. I remember riding in the car with them in the days before seat belts, sitting on the front right side, with Suzanne in the middle. Suzanne would slide up so close to Vernie, you’d think they were soldered together. Her left hand would sit on his right leg, way too close to his crotch area for me to be able to even look at it. How can you even make small talk when this woman is fondling your uncle’s genitals? I was embarrassed more than once when Suzanne would announce she was withholding sex from Vernie until he did what she wanted. It wasn’t until I got deep into this research that I started to understand what behavioral changes she wanted from him.
It was such a contrast from the quiet and peaceful life he had shared in Beloit with the elegant and stately Jenylle and their daughter, Shannon, who was cute, with long, wavy brown hair and filled with enormous energy and smiles. Whereas Suzanne knew how to mix the perfect drink, Jenylle was known for her aromatic breads and tidy home. Vernie didn’t drink much when he was with Jenylle.
My own family included a teetotaler father, which might sound positive compared to others in my tribe, but my father was a gambling addict, always sure the next bet would bring overflowing rewards and would spend our rent money on the next “sure thing,” which, of course, was anything but sure.
When I was at Shannon’s, it always felt so clean, so quiet, even when Jenylle would run the Hoover, which she did every day, as well as mopping the kitchen tiles. “Her floors were so clean, you could eat off of them,” my grandma liked to say. Shannon and I would go outside and play croquet in the hot summer sun, then turn on the sprinkler and run through the cold water. Jenylle would call us in for lunch and serve perfect triangles of grilled cheese sandwiches, with sliced pickles on the side, on white china dishes, all placed in the center of blue
square linen place mats.
Back then I didn’t understand why Vernie would throw all that away. After years of my own therapy I can see that he must have wanted more drama in his life, so he took up with a woman who evidently kept his hormones raging. He left Leave It to Beaver’s June Cleaver for the Sharon Stone character in Basic Instinct. As each year went by, though, his words became increasingly slurred, his wrinkles that much deeper, and his sadness more intense.
Everyone in the family felt—I mean we just knew—he would come back crawling on his knees to his rejected wife. This possibility, or should I say “certainty,” was evidently shared by Jenylle herself. Otherwise, why would an attractive and sociable woman never even date for seven years and then marry her high school sweetheart a year after the murder? Even at the funeral everyone treated Jenylle as Vernie’s widow.
“Ma,” said my uncle, his voice halting, “they’re gonna have a closed casket.”
“What?” Grandma shouted. Good Norwegians always had a “showing” before the funeral. When my own brother died eight years earlier, I remember my grandmother stroking his cold, hard hands as he lay in the casket. She told me how comforting that was. Helped her accept the loss a little easier, she said.
“It was a shotgun, Ma, and he’s . . . he’s—”
Grandma dropped the red Folgers coffee can and spilled grounds all over the counter as she bolted toward the tiny bathroom and locked the door with the tiny s-shaped hook. We heard her screaming and wailing and thrashing about, as much as you could in four by seven feet. This was not my grandmother, the stoic family leader, who is always the role model of calmly solving the worst of problems, of thoughtfully analyzing alternative solutions to a crisis. Now I look back and think her aberrant behavior was, for a few minutes, more like Suzanne’s, who would always cause an emotional earthquake at every family gathering. The first I remember was another family funeral, not long after she and Vernie got together. We were all at the farmhouse afterward, sharing our collective mourning. Vernie was trying to console his siblings and spent some time in the kitchen with them, while the blond, frail Suzanne, who had eyes that were green with dots of brown (or was that violet?), was in the living room sitting like a queen holding court. After fifteen minutes of waiting for her subjects to appear, she started fidgeting and cursing under her breath. Then Suzanne jumped off the couch and burst into the kitchen like a tsunami hitting land. No one was spared. Her verbal attack wounded everyone.
“Oh, LaVerne! You can’t leave me alone like this. I saw the way your sister [the author’s mother] looked at me. And look at you [to his brother], supposed to be Vernie’s loyal brother, you think I didn’t catch that smile just now to your sweet little wife? Oh, I see it in all of your eyes. You’re all just scheming with Vernie so he’ll go back to that supposed saint, Jenylle. None of you fool me. This morning it was your mother and now the rest of you are plotting to get rid of me. Vernie!” she screamed at the top of her lungs with a shrillness that could have shattered a crystal goblet. “We are leaving right now. I mean, this minute.” And out the door she marched, her breathing heavy, her face tight and drawn. A little later we heard the sound of her opening and then slamming the car door.
Vernie looked at all of us with that sheepish grin he had when he was trying to use his personality to cover up some uncomfortable truth. Then he was gone, but the smile remained.
All of this swirled in my mind as we sat there staring at Grandma’s bathroom door. The wailing and thrashing had not stopped. No one said aloud what we were all thinking. Is she going to hurt herself? Is this death one too many for her? Can she not take it that her youngest child has been brutally murdered? Did she wonder what Uncle Vernie had been thinking, pinned to his bedroom wall with the gun pointed at his head? Was he thinking that Jenylle had been his one true love and now he was paying the ultimate price for leaving her? Did he wish he could have willed himself back to his first marriage, in the quiet Beloit home? Did he wonder what in the hell he was doing in Oregon, Wisconsin? Did he know his brains were about to be splattered all over the plastered blue wall, with its stucco shaped in oval swirls?
My other living uncle became the interim leader of the family. That day at Grandma’s, he took charge of the situation and pushed hard against the door and broke the fragile lock. Grandma was crying and throwing wads of Charmin against the wall. She came out and sat at the table, her face as still as the wood carvings another uncle had loved to make.
“We’ll have the funeral in Beloit,” she said.1
CHAPTER TWO
The Visit
I was about to embark on interaction with unknown persons, or at least unknown for more than forty years. There was no way to know how much they’d changed, so I had to assume I was going into “foreign” territory and reminded myself to be as polite and inquisitive as I had been when my three daughters and I moved to Prague back in the 1990s, when I’d been selected as a Fulbright Scholar and was teaching Leadership at the University of Economics, Prague, and to MBA students at the Czech Management Center. By this time, I had also been teaching and writing a great deal about cross-cultural management (including one of my then ten published books), so I felt I had some background to help me in this unknown land.
My job was to be sensitive to this family’s needs and their ways of interaction, so that I might be able to ask some difficult questions and they would trust me enough to give me straight answers.
I nervously considered my travel options, wrote them down on an Excel spreadsheet document as I sat cramped in my eight-by-eight-foot office, an open alcove in my New York City apartment. After a long time of deep breathing and trying to apply the concepts of mindfulness to calm what felt like a panic attack, I picked up the phone and dialed Suzanne’s daughter Louisa’s number. A man with a deep and raspy voice answered.
When I asked tentatively whether Louisa was there, he told me that she was out.
“Is this her husband?” I asked.
“No, it’s David, her brother,” he said offhandedly. This made me gasp. What did I say now? I hadn’t even considered this possibility when I had gone over every feasible permutation of this conversation in my head. I mean, David lived in a nearby town.
After what must have seemed like the kind of pause you get when telemarketers call, I gathered some courage. “Oh, David! This is Dorothy. Dorothy Marcic.”
“Dorsey?”
“No. Dorothy. Like in The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy Marcic.”
“Who are you?”
“Your cousin.”
“I don’t have a cousin named Dorothy,” he said almost defensively.
“Vernie’s niece . . . from way back,” I said, trying to find something he could connect to.
“Vernie? Who was Vernie?”
“Your stepfather. Back in the late sixties.”
“My stepfather?”
By this time I was in a Kafka story. But I knew good communication under stress meant staying calm, so I continued. “Your mother’s husband. Vernie.”
What I wanted to say was “You know, the fourth spouse? The one you or your mother murdered,” but I didn’t think that would help me create a connection with David.
Long silence. I imagined his mind was racing through many memories, scattered thoughts.
He finally replied, “Oh . . . oh . . . Vernie. Vernie.”
“I’m his sister’s daughter.”
“He had a sister?” he asked, and now I wondered why I even bothered to go on. Was this the time to be persistent, or to cut my losses?
The conversation continued with David, who did not seem to know Vernie had any siblings, and me hopelessly giving him a family tree he doubtless had no interest in, because he quickly changed the subject.
“Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” he asked hopefully, his voice elevating in pitch.
“I believe Jesus was the Son of God.”
“We’re going to have the Holy Spirit work on you,” he announced with the k
ind of voice a boss uses when he promises to give a raise, but the employee isn’t quite sure of the outcome.
I told David I was coming to Tennessee next Saturday and asked if I could visit, but he wouldn’t give me any definite answer, and he seemed to pull back.
“I’ll have Louisa call you back,” he said with no emotion.
On the Thursday preceding my trip I still hadn’t heard back. My mind kept suggesting that they didn’t want me there, never wanted to see me again, were hoping I’d disappear like an annoying drip from the bathroom faucet. Where Suzanne and family were a recurring subject for us, Suzanne’s family had seemingly Photoshopped us out of their lives in some kind of collective amnesia.
I thought about just showing up at their house; then they’d have to see me, unless they pretended not to be home. And I couldn’t face driving four hours to find people who might not answer the door.
So I dialed Louisa’s number. Again a man answered, who had a deeper, more confident voice. This time it was her husband, and I introduced myself.
“Oh, yeah, I see a note David left for Louisa.”
Rather than politely ask if I could come, as I had last time, I began more confidently.
“I’m Louisa’s cousin from way back. We haven’t seen each other for years, and I am really looking forward to seeing Louisa, David, and Suzanne,” I began.
His reply shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. “Have you been saved? Do you accept Jesus?”
After some awkward silence I gave the same answer as I had to David. At that point I knew it wasn’t just David. Evidently the whole house was really into Jesus, so I had to be diplomatic in how I responded to their desire to save me from eternal damnation.
“So you and David are both born-again Christians?” I asked.
With One Shot Page 2