King Dork (27 page)

We had discovered something potentially meaningful, yet

I didn’t get much satisfaction from it. Part of that was because solving one puzzle had simply opened a new set of puzzles, and vaguer ones at that, and I was more confused than ever.

But mostly, it was because the whole thing gave me an un-

comfortable, creepy feeling. Tit’s note was creepy. The Bible passage was creepy. It wasn’t what I had been going for with this cute little hobby of trying to investigate my dad’s teenage life through clues he had inadvertently left behind. I looked down at all of our research materials spread out on the table:
Catcher,
CEH 1960; the note from Tit;
The Seven Storey
Mountain;
the Jerusalem Bible; the concordance; my French dictionary; my various notebooks—I could almost see and feel them morph from charming-exhilarating-profound to sordid-depressing-pointless. For some reason the phrase “brood of vipers” kept echoing unpleasantly in my head. I had this idi-otic notion that the materials spread out on the table formed a kind of picture of the world, and that it wasn’t a picture I particularly cared for. And my dad’s role in this picture was maddeningly dim and indistinct.

I had once again been distracted from the investigation

by my own fantasies and emotions. Not Sam Hellerman,

though. He was a bespectacled teenage research machine,

the dork Woodward and the geek Bernstein rolled into one

diminutive, socially inferior package, loading the archives of the
San Francisco Chronicle
into the microfilm viewing machine.

I tried to shake the vipers out of my head. It seemed to

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me that the way to approach the
Seven Storey Mountain/

Timothy J. Anderson problem was not so much through try-

ing to understand the meaning of the text itself but through thinking of the quotation as a kind of object, an accessory. I wear a “Kill ’em All” shirt and it pegs me as a Guns-and-Ammo guy, even if I don’t literally want
everybody
to get killed and sorted out by God. Sam Hellerman’s black high-tops put him in this category made up of the kind of people who wear Converse All Stars; and if you notice that I, too, am wearing black high-tops, you could conjecture that I might have more in common with Sam Hellerman than just shoes.

Perhaps, I thought, it’s the same way with quotations from the Bible as it is with shoes. So this freaky monk character has Matthew 3:9–11 on the title page of his book; Timothy J.

Anderson had it on his funeral card. Maybe Timothy J.

Anderson was a freaky monk, too. Clergy.

I had been thinking along these lines for a couple of days, since the Dr. Hexstrom session I described above, when I explained to her about how I ended up being called Chi-Mo.

Now, one thing you have to understand is that my con-

versations with Dr. Hexstrom involved very few spoken

words. We had quickly reached the point where a great deal could be communicated through a series of facial expressions and meaningful looks. It would have looked a bit like telepa-thy to an outside observer, probably, though it wasn’t. We were like two slans, that Dr. Hexstrom and me.

She got the ball rolling, as usual, with a question: “So, in view of that, how do you feel about your father being Catholic?”

My look said “how do you mean, Catholic?”

She gave me a pretty complicated look, which basically

meant “what part of Catholic don’t you understand?” but also implied “come, come, now, you’re a bright boy—surely such

an obvious fact cannot have escaped you?”

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Well, she was right, of course, as I realized when I

thought about it. We had never gone to church as a family, that I could recall, and I don’t remember there being any talk of my dad’s going to church on his own, either. But my dad’s funeral had been in a Catholic church and he was buried in a Catholic cemetery, or rather in a Catholic marble filing cabinet for dead people. When I brought it up to Amanda later

on,
she
looked at me as though I were as dumb as a bag of dry leaves and said of course he had been Catholic. She even

knew the names of the Catholic schools he had attended:

Queen of the Universe grammar school and MPB College

Preparatory. That’s what I get for spending so much time in my own world. Humiliating ignorance of the obvious.

I guess I’d always figured my dad had had the same reli-

gious views as my mom. She thought organized religion was

for unsophisticated simpletons. She wanted everyone to be

“free-thinking” instead. So she embraced “spirituality,” which pretty much meant whatever happened to turn up in the

Body and Spirit section of her organic cooking magazines.

I’m not any religion myself, but for the record, I’m pretty sure I do believe in God. It’s just a feeling I have. I can’t prove it, but since when are you supposed to prove a feeling? God is the only situation where they expect you to do that.

(Though I have to say, the universe seems so flawlessly designed to be at my expense that I doubt it could be entirely accidental.) Even if I didn’t believe in God, though, I’d probably say I did just out of spite. To irritate people like my mom who think believing in God is tacky and beneath them.

They’re wrong about everything else; chances are they’re

wrong about that, too. Plus, God embarrasses people. Which I totally enjoy.

Anyway, I couldn’t see how my mom could have han-

dled it if my dad had been a full-on Catholic. She would have 206

spent so much time ridiculing him that there wouldn’t have been any time left to ask which dress made her look fatter.

Maybe, in fact, this method of avoiding that topic was the key to a successful marriage, but I couldn’t quite picture it.

I must have been looking puzzled, because Dr. Hexstrom’s

face once again went: “you’re a bright boy—this is not really all that hard to get.” Then she added, in words, “many of those books are books Catholics used to read in the sixties.”

My look said:
“Catcher
and
Slan
and
The Doors of
Perception
? Surely not.”

Her look was once again complicated: “some of the

books are books young people read in the sixties,” it said patiently, “some are books Catholics read in the sixties, and some are books sixties people read in the sixties. Ergo: your father was young and Catholic in the sixties.”

“Plus,” she added in words, “your mother told me.”

Well, that seemed like cheating, but there was no arguing

with it. My inclined head said, with what I hoped was a touch of class: “Touché.”

So back to the library research session with Sam

Hellerman: there I was thinking about all this Catholic stuff, my nickname, and the notion that the stones/Abraham quote

might be something Catholic clergy tended to associate with themselves. And I had pretty much reached the conclusion—

in fact, I had little doubt—that what we were dealing with here was some kind of pedophile priest situation.

Timothy J. Anderson was a clergyman who had molested

Tit and maybe others, maybe even my dad—a weird thought

indeed. Tit and company had finally risen up to take some

kind of elaborate revenge. Poisoned the Communion wine.

Pushed him out of a bell tower. The bastard was dead at last, thrown into the metaphorical fire, as such a man was surely going straight to hell. Tit had hated him so much that he

207

hadn’t even considered going to the funeral, but my dad had gone for some reason. To view the body, to make sure the b.

was d.? Did such things ever really happen? Presumably so: if it can be thought, it can be done.

So when Sam Hellerman called me over to the microfilm

viewer, I was expecting to read an obituary from around

3/13/63 noting the death (under mysterious circumstances,

perhaps) of someone by the name of Brother Timothy J.

Anderson.

“It’s a monk, right?” I said. “A dead monk. Possibly poi-

soned.”

Sam Hellerman stared at me.

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Or a priest, a bishop, something like that.” I started to explain my theory, but he was already shaking his head.

Because here’s what he had found in the archives, or

rather, what he hadn’t found: there was no obituary or death notice for anyone by the name of Timothy J. Anderson anywhere around that date.

“Priests,” he said, “are prominent members of the com-

munity. There’s no way a death like that wouldn’t be in the paper.”

I could see that he was probably right. Yet the card pretty clearly indicated a funeral in San Francisco at the time. Had the listing been suppressed because of the scandal? But if there had been a scandal, if the story was “out,” we’d have seen huge head-lines about “Altar Boy Avengers” or something. (Which is not a bad band name, as Sam Hellerman replied when I mentioned

it.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is usually dark and secret and behind the scenes and only comes out after everyone involved has had years of therapy and/or Alzheimer’s.

Nonetheless, Timothy J. Anderson, whoever he had

been, had clearly lived and died somehow. There were pre-

208

sumably official death records other than newspapers that

could be checked somewhere, though the very thought filled me with fatigue and dread.

A moment earlier everything had seemed to fit together

neatly, if distastefully. Now nothing fit, but the distastefulness remained. We tried looking up Timothy J. Anderson in every local reference book we could find: no result, not even close.

Well, we could call up all the Andersons in the phone book to ask if any of them knew a Timothy J. who had died in

1963. Yeah, right.

“I’m sorry, dude,” said Sam Hellerman, because we had

started to say dude recently. “He doesn’t exist.”

CON N ECTION S

Tracking down Deanna-Fiona was going to be a snap com-

pared to figuring out the deal with Timothy J. Anderson, and not just because she wasn’t dead. But the prospect filled me with terror because it would involve more speaking out loud than I liked even under normal circumstances, and these circumstances would not be normal. There were no listings for any Schumachers in Salthaven, Salthaven Vista, Old Mission Hills, Rancho Sans Souci, or any of the surrounding towns.

But every year Immaculate Heart Academy puts out a book-

let called “Connections,” which has contact information for all the students. Hillmont has a similar thing, called “What’s the Buzz (Call a Knight!),” and as I realized after I had

thought about it a bit, there was a pretty good chance that I already had a copy of last year’s edition of IHA-SV’s

“Connections” somewhere in my room.

Mrs. Teneb, my mom’s nondiminutive female actor friend,

had a daughter who went there, and last year there had been 209

some talk of trying to stimulate my nonexistent social life by encouraging me to get in touch with some of the IHA-SV girls.

The pretense had been my imaginary Monty Python/Dr.

Who club and Susye Teneb’s hugely implausible claim that

there was a group of geek girls who had a similar club at IHA-SV. No doubt that myth had its origin in some feeble practical joke attempt by Susye Teneb, but names had been underlined and the book solemnly received and eventually ignored,

thrown in the corner with all the other junk in my room.

It took a while to dig it out, but when I did, there she was: Deanna Gabriella Schumacher, 1854 North del Norte Plaza

Circle, Salthaven, with a phone number and everything. I had trouble whacking up the nerve to call, though, and I kept putting it off and making excuses for why it might be better to wait. Because this was really it. Make-or-break time for the Fiona-Deanna Deal. I wanted to know what would happen,

but I was scared at the same time. The library research session had filled me with a kind of resolve, though, and I decided to give it a shot that night.

Holden Caulfield, when calling his various preppie girl-

friends, would always say he planned to hang up if the parents answered. I told myself that’s what I’d do, too, even though I knew she would probably have her own phone. In

the fifties, no one had their own goddam phone and all, as HC would have put it. In other words, modern communications technology and the higher standard of living had made things more convenient and less convenient at the same time.

I almost couldn’t bring myself to dial the numbers, I was

so nervous, and I had no idea what I would say. I got an answering machine that said “Didi’s phone, leave me a mes-

sage.” Hanging up on the machine was like Holden’s hanging up on Jane Gallagher’s highfalutin parents. I was doing okay in the grand tradition of calling up girls and not knowing 210

what to say and then hanging up without saying anything.

Mr. Schtuppe should give me extra credit or something.

The effort had taken a lot out of me, though. I was feel-

ing a little faint and peaked. It was six-forty-five. I decided to try again in twenty minutes. I poured the rest of my Coke

down the drain and poured some of my mom’s bourbon into

the empty can. Because I needed some help, man.

The fourth time I tried Deanna Schumacher’s number,

the answering machine message had been changed to “Look,

asshole, I screen, so if you don’t leave a message there’s no way you’ll ever find out if I would have picked up.”

Off to a good start. So after the beep, I said, haltingly,

“This—this message is for Deanna Schumacher—” I pro-

nounced it shoe-mocker. But the phone was suddenly picked

up and a female voice said, “Skoo-macker.”

“Skoo-macker?” I repeated.

“Skoo-macker,” said the voice.

“Really?”

I realized the conversation was going nowhere, and I de-