Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Mrs. Miller, a salty old party, was alone, and to her distraught visitor’s questions replied, “I don’t know where they’re at, but neither of ’em is worth a tinker’s damn.” Mrs. Marland bridled. “You can’t talk about Louis like that to me!”

  Her brother and sister-in-law, who lived in Tulsa, warned that Louis was bad for her, but carried away as she was, she refused to listen.

  In vain did George and Laverne Marland remonstrate with her.

  She drove east out of Ponca City, not west, as Louis had done. There could be no doubt about this, because she turned up, three hundred miles later, at a place called the Moonlight Motel, outside Independence, Missouri, and stayed there for ten weeks. She befriended the family who owned the motel, or at any rate they took pity on her. They told the police that at her request, they’d allowed her to help clean the rooms, a task she performed, Kobler writes, “clad in an Indian squaw’s dress designed for younger women.” When she burned a bedsheet with a hot iron, she insisted on paying them back.

  In particular she was drawn to the family’s older daughter, Deloris. As she grew closer to Deloris, who had been married a few months earlier, she plied her with naive questions about the nature of love and sexuality. How did a woman know when she was in love? Could a young man truly love an older woman?

  She also tried, during this time, to sell her paintings, but she felt the prices offered by the local dealers were too low. Finally, in early June, she received a letter from a gallery in Manhattan. The next day she checked out of the motel. She told the family she was going to New York. To their surprise, however (as they later told the police), when she drove away, she turned west, not east, on Route 24. She had once mentioned some people she might stay with in Nebraska; perhaps, they thought, she had gone to join them?

  The first few pages of the Saturday Evening Post story are full of black-and-white portraits: Lydie smiling with a gentle, intelligent expression in about 1950; a younger Lydie in 1933; Louis Cassel in a tweed coat and black tie, glowering past the photographer. Later, after the jump to page 44, the pages are lined with advertisements, and the advertisements are more interesting than the portraits, because they are precisely the sort of atmospheric flotsam that Lydie found compelling and that she often clipped from magazines. “ORAFix holds dentures fast—all day!” “Did you know Cobalt Was used by the … ANCIENT EGYPTIANS?”

  ATOM TRACER TESTS PROVE INTRACEL PENETRATES THROUGH AND BELOW THE SKIN

  Kills Muscular Pain at Its Very Source

  On page 47, a paragraph tracing the peak of her despair during the breakdown of her relationship with Louis is interrupted by a joke. The joke is unconnected to the narrative, and set off from the main text between two horizontal lines.

  The best way to teach your wife to drive is in someone else’s car.

  —ROBERT FITCH

  After she left the Moonlight Motel, Lydie faded from view—not tracelessly, and not all at once, but so quickly that it was unnerving. She placed a phone call in 1956, to the Knoedler Gallery in New York, where she had left a painting, Alfred Miller’s Buffalo Hunt, to be sold on commission; when Kobler wrote his story in 1958, the painting was still in the gallery. Because of the phone call, it seemed unlikely that she had been murdered. If she had died by some other means after 1956, it seemed likely that her body would have been found. In 1959, according to the Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Morning Herald, a certain A. M. Peck claimed to have received a letter from her and to have it in his possession. But if she was still alive, what was she running from, and why had she refused to contact her brother? The police tracked down Louis Cassel in Germany, where he had reenlisted in the army, and where he had married, and separated from, a fourth wife. They gave him a polygraph test. But he was little help.

  If Mrs. Marland would have contacted me in any way or manner while I was in Washington, I would have did anything in my power to aid or help her.

  A fact that does not appear in the Saturday Evening Post story, nor in any other account from this period, is that shortly before Lydie left town, she contacted a worker from a local monument company. She had a statue, she told him, that she wanted to have destroyed. The statue depicted her, Lydie, as the young woman she’d been in the mid-1920s, when a famous artist had traveled from Paris to sculpt her. The monument worker’s name was Glen Gilchrist. She told him to smash the face first. She watched as he did so. Then she told him to dispose of the rest. Gilchrist hauled the remains to his own land, where he buried them north of his barn. He told no one outside his family. The fragments were buried on Gilchrist’s property in 1953, when Lydie fled from Ponca City, and they were still buried there twenty-two years later, when she came back.

  2

  When I was seven or eight years old, my mother’s father, Gene Ellis, my grandfather, bought a large pontoon boat, which he docked at a remote cove on Kaw Lake, a few miles from Ponca City. My grandparents lived in town. Their house was on Monument Road, just down the street from the walls of the old tycoon’s estate. The chauffeur’s cottage where Lydie had lived was a five-minute walk from their front door, not that they, or anyone, had much reason to make it. Our house was two miles away. For the next year or so, when the weather was warm we were often on the boat, with sunscreen and potato chips.

  Northern Oklahoma on a pontoon boat may not be what you picture when you think of a boating idyll—or maybe it is; I’m not here to tell you how to feel about Jet Skis. It’s not Newport. At Kaw Lake the vibe was intensely landlocked. Even swampy in places. Ramshackle piers with tall grass growing alongside them. I have mostly good memories. Once, it’s true, I missed the step off the dock and plunged straight down into the water, too startled to close my eyes, but even that was fascinating in its way. The underwater world of Kaw Lake always fascinated me, because I’d heard that when the Corps of Engineers dammed the reservoir many years ago, an entire town, Kaw City, had been submerged and left under the water (this was true). Whenever I swam in the lake, I half expected nixie fingers to seize me by the ankles and pull me down to the lost city, the kingdom of sprites, where I’d remain forever in the empty post office, lost to the sun and air.

  I’d never known my grandfather to show any interest in boating, but even at seven or eight I understood that this was how he did things, with an impulsiveness so decisive and so laconic that the whole question of premeditation seemed somehow beside the point. Explanations, generally speaking, ran counter to my grandfather’s mode of being. If he had an idea about how to farm pigs more efficiently, he became a pig farmer. If he wanted to fly, he bought an airplane. Saw a boat he liked? Let’s hit the water. Why would someone need to know what he was thinking, when anyone could see what he was doing? One day around this time, he showed up at our house with a trailer hauling a small circus carousel. He’d seen it at a barbecue trade show and traded a smoker oven for it. Now it was a gift for my sister and me. It had a blue horse and a flying elephant. It had candy-striped poles. When they finally got it installed, it took up half the back patio. It played tinny music. If he ever told anyone what possessed him to acquire it, the report never reached me.

  Gene was born in 1920. He grew up on a farm in the deep nowhere of Red Rock, Oklahoma, where his family gritted out the Dust Bowl in a house they’d ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog. Windmill, chickens, faded laundry on a line. The land had belonged to the Otoe-Missouria tribe—that is, the tribe was forcibly resettled there—before the government broke up the reservations in the 1890s; it was still largely surrounded by Otoe-Missouria allotments. During the war Gene trained as a pilot with the navy. The fighting stopped before he was sent overseas. Like many men of his generation, he left the military determined that no one would ever again tell him what to do, a determination that in my grandfather’s case cannot have lain too far below the surface to begin with. Having always been both a little too rough and quite a bit too smart for his surroundings, he promptly moved back to them, returning to Red Rock with a new wife—Judy, my grandmother�
��and beginning a career of this and that. He tinkered with machines. He farmed. He hunted in the woods. He invented a new kind of feed mill and sold it around the country under the name Ellis Feed & Seed. He got elected mayor of Red Rock. He was brilliant, impatient, not infrequently drunk. He’d build beautiful knotty-pine cabinets for my grandmother’s kitchen (where had he learned how to work that way with wood? he just knew). Then he’d come home with ugly plastic furniture he hadn’t bothered to show her first.

  My mother, the second of three children, grew up in a house with a gas pump at the end of the drive. Her pet raccoon out back. Gene’s Cessna in the field. From their house it was miles to the nearest paved road. My grandfather’s idea of a vacation was to pile the whole family into the car and drive for a week, then turn around and drive home. Roadside diners and motel pools: You got away, saw what was there, kept moving, went back.

  My grandmother also came from Oklahoma, but she met my grandfather in California, during the war. He was in flight school and she worked for Lockheed, building aircraft. A mutual friend introduced them. I have a box of letters he wrote to her after he left California for training in Texas. My grandmother saved the letters. There were hundreds, often more than one a day.

  Dearest Brat,

  How’s that for confidence—three days with no letter and tomorrow (Sunday) will make four days and then I call you “dearest.”

  They were wildly unalike. Judy had grown up in Oklahoma City. Her father, my great-grandfather, was a blacksmith. He was also an alcoholic, which can’t have helped his metalwork much. During the Depression, Judy had to drop out of school and take a job to bring money home. She worked at a soda counter. So the Baileys weren’t among Oklahoma City’s elite—the opposite—but still, it was a city; you had culture, taste, refinement, even if only of the shopwindow variety. You could hear music they didn’t play in the country. You could go dancing. You were close enough to civilization for some of it to rub off on you, if you wanted.

  All her life, my grandmother had a quality of delicacy that never quite made sense in her surroundings. She was patient. She approached the world with sympathy and a kind of nervous gentleness, qualities whose frequency fell wholly outside my grandfather’s range of hearing, except that he loved them in her. She liked floral teacups, English novels, really anything English; I remember, as a small child, playing in her room while she watched Masterpiece Theater. She loved All Creatures Great and Small. I didn’t entirely know what England was, but it seemed to be a calming influence in the house on Monument Road, where there were elk heads on the walls, clumps of uprooted machinery on the breakfast table, and fierce tribal masks that my uncle sent home from New Guinea, where he lived. My grandmother had a turquoise bathtub, which struck me as deeply exotic, and when I was very small, three or four, I was sometimes allowed to take baths in it. She had sweet-smelling bath salts. I remember hearing her say “Crabtree and Evelyn.” To me, not understanding the words but catching the hint of what they meant to her, they sounded like portals to some larger, richer world.

  You can imagine, then, what a jolt it was for my grandmother to find herself in Red Rock after the war. In California the world had looked full of possibility; now she was living in a cramped house in the middle of nowhere, with a husband who butchered his own deer carcasses, who periodically vanished on three-day benders, who expected her, if the kittens took sick, to put them in a sack and drown them in the creek. In a county where the dirt roads turned impassable whenever it rained. She rolled up her sleeves, but it was hard. My grandfather had a brother. Family lore is unclear on what precisely was wrong with him—something with his brain, he’d had a high fever as a boy—but he’d drift over from the farm when my grandfather was away, and he behaved in ways that frightened my grandmother. Certainly he was threatening, probably sexually so. My mother and her siblings were taught to hide when he appeared. Finally my grandmother had to fight him off with a broom. After that, Gene paid him a visit, and he didn’t bother my grandmother again.

  They moved to Ponca City in the 1960s, around the time my mother started high school. No doubt my grandmother had dreamed of the day—Ponca, with its twenty-five thousand souls, being the metropolis of legend where Red Rock was concerned—but on my grandfather’s end the change seems to have been characteristically impetuous. He was angry over the result of a school board election? Something like that. In any case, it’s undeniable that as time went on, particularly after the move, the balance of their marriage shifted toward my grandmother. In Ponca City, she picked out the furniture.

  As Gene was getting tired of pig farming, he found that he was now extremely interested in barbecue, so he invented a kind of smoker oven and started a new company to sell it, along with a line of barbecue sauce and tubs of my grandmother’s chili spice. Judy kept the books. They opened a factory outside Ponca City. The company made a lot of money, and success or age or their combination mellowed my grandfather. He drank less. No doubt he still terrorized his employees; to my sister and me he was a lamb. The year before, he’d shown us our first VCR tape: He pushed a button and suddenly the runners (it was a race from the Olympics) were wriggling backward toward the starting line. On a trip to Germany, he got inspired by the construction of some little cottages he saw, and when he came back he built an astonishingly ornate playhouse in our backyard, across from the carousel. It had levels. It had insulated walls. That playhouse became the base for every game of my childhood, the command center for every neighborhood battle. Years later, when I was in junior high, my friends and I blacked out the windows and played Dungeons & Dragons by flashlight. Gene’s unpredictability, often a frightening quality for his own children, manifested for us only as a thrilling capacity for surprise.

  One day in the spring of 1985, we spent the evening on the boat with my grandparents. I was nine. It must have been a Saturday, because it was the evening before Mother’s Day. The previous afternoon, my grandmother had taken my sister, who was five, shopping, and they had bought a set of wind chimes for my mother, which we hung near the carousel, on the back porch. That evening, on the boat, something felt off. Not alarmingly, but noticeably. It had to do with my grandfather. His voice was loud. He was drinking whiskey out of a teacup, and when he teased me about taking karate lessons (actually tae kwon do, I said seriously), he did a mock hai-ya! kick from his seat that caught me on the hip; it was hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I didn’t think anything of it. We puttered around the lake in the pontoon boat, wearing our life jackets, and then my father rowed my mother and my sister and me around the cove in the green rowboat my grandparents kept at their dock. We sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” as a round (not typically a part-singing family, we must have been carried away by the novelty of being on the water). I got to try my hand at rowing.

  When it was time for us to go home, my grandfather said he would stay at the lake a little longer, because he wanted to take the rowboat out and run some fishing lines. My grandmother said she would stay with him. This complicated things, because my grandmother had driven us to the dock in her car—my grandfather had gone out earlier, in his truck—but not to worry: We could drive Judy’s car back to our house, and the two of them would come by and pick it up later, on the way back to Monument Road. Simple enough. I was excited to ride home in my grandmother’s silver Ford, because it had a keypad lock, four numbered buttons in a horizontal row above the door handle, and I had never seen another car with a lock like that, and it was fun to tap in the combination.

  That night, my mother woke up and noticed that the silver Ford was still in our driveway. But that wasn’t anything to worry over. My grandparents had probably just decided to go straight home after a long day on the water. We’d all been tired. My grandfather had looked especially tired, my mother thought. They would come for the car in the morning.

  In the morning the car was still in the driveway.

  Well—it was Sunday, Mother’s Day, a day to sleep in. Still no reason to worry. Just t
o be safe, my mother called Monument Road.

  No answer.

  It would be just like my grandfather, we all agreed, to have lit out on some trip without telling anyone. My parents decided to drive over to Monument to check whether anyone had been home.

  We were sure it would come out all right. This was a temporary confusion, one we’d laugh about later—how dire the misunderstanding had felt, how harmless it had turned out to be.

  My parents didn’t know how long they’d be gone, so they dropped my sister and me off at our other grandmother’s house, on Berkshire, a block away from home. Our other grandmother, Bonnie, my father’s mother, was at that time very sick with cancer. She had become, in her illness, deeply religious, religious in a way I, without knowing many details, understood to be intense and ultra-evangelical, and that morning she was being looked after by someone from her church, a woman whose name I can’t remember. Diana? I don’t remember seeing Bonnie, though we must have, we would have gone back to her room to say hello, but all I remember is sitting at the counter in her kitchen and looking at a copy of The Ponca City News while the caretaker stood over the stove. The newspaper was open to the classifieds—I suppose Diana, or whatever her name was, must have been paging through them—and she explained to my sister and me that we were not worried enough about our missing grandparents. God was watching us, she said, and if we really loved Gene and Judy we would be praying for them. If they were dead, she told us, it was because we were not praying hard enough. God heard. She was making oatmeal, I think, as she said this? Stirring a steaming pot. After what seemed like a very long time, my father came, alone, and picked us up.

  Back at our house, things were different. Some adults were there, in the living room. As we came through the front door, I had a glimpse of my aunt, my mother’s older sister, sitting on the couch with her feet curled under her, her face looking smeared and strange. My mother met us in the entryway and took us back to her bedroom. She knelt down and put her hands on our shoulders and told us that Grandma Judy was dead and that Papa Gene probably was, too. She said that my grandmother had drowned in the lake. They had found her body. They had not found my grandfather, but Robert Hardee, my aunt’s boyfriend, the artist, was back on the water with the Lake Patrol, and they were looking for him now.