3

So Bobby puts the past behind him, and Ginny soldiers on, saying little now herself about that part of her history.

She is sliding into her middle sixties, with the usual concerns, complaints, and crow’s feet. She drinks and smokes more than is good for her and is more tightly wound than she used to be—yet she is still the inevitable center of attention of whatever gathering she happens to be in. She is about to give up her board activity at what is now Abbott Northwestern Hospital, but remains an energetic and persuasive fundraiser for the institution. She still accompanies Bobby to New York, where she charms and entertains her husband’s Wall Street associates, and she remains a very popular guest at employee weddings and other Piper, Jaffray events.

She has struggled through the divorces of two sons, and she has started to lose family members and old pals to illness and death. But she and Bobby have a half dozen grandkids on whom they dote, and maintain a closeness to their middle-aged children that is the envy of many friends. Her sisters marvel at the ease with which she can still transform herself from an ordinary hausfrau raking leaves with a bandana around her head to an elegant hostess in a chic satin dress. She is still quick to speak her mind, especially after a few drinks. She still has the ability to make whomever she is talking to feel as though he or she is at that moment the center of her universe.

The fear instilled by her experience may have faded, but it hasn’t disappeared. Years afterward she is still reluctant to spend the night in the house alone or to travel out of town by herself. She loves her afternoons on the terrace, reading in one of the lounge chairs or fiddling with her flowers while listening to the Twins on her transistor radio. But she is ever alert to the sound of a car in the driveway in a way she wasn’t until a summer afternoon all those years ago.

In 1985 Bobby is diagnosed with prostate cancer. Surgery is successful, but his illness startles the family. When Charlotte Morrison dies the following year, soon after a diagnosis of uterine cancer, Ginny is shattered.

Ginny and Chy were only fifteen months apart. They were similarly engaged and involved with their world, similarly strong willed and competitive, and married to men who happened to be best friends. Chy was an accomplished equestrienne and shared with Ginny a passion for golf and flowers. All five of the Lewis sisters carried the family’s beauty and style sense, but Chy and Ginny may have looked most alike. They were practically neighbors, they partied and celebrated and vacationed together, and their kids grew up bosom buddies as well as first cousins.

It was Chy who first learned of Ginny’s abduction, and Chy who called Bobby—“Something’s happened to Ginny!” It was to the Morrisons’ big house on the lake that family members retreated that frightening afternoon, guarded and questioned by the FBI. And it was Chy, along with their sister Carol, who scrubbed the grime off Ginny when Ginny came home from the woods.

Following his surgery, Bobby’s cancer goes into remission. But Ginny’s tenuously restored sense of security and well-being has been dealt a pair of terrible blows.

Ginny may have been aware of her own symptoms some time before the diagnosis and probably should have seen her doctor, but she didn’t. By early July 1988, her stomach pain becomes severe, and her weight loss is evident. She is given a CT scan and other tests, and on July 6 she is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

In late July she hosts a small wedding party at Woodhill for Don Hennings, one of Bobby’s closest business associates, and his bride. It will be the last such gathering she will attend, though no one is ready to acknowledge that at the time.

“I hope my cancer’s not as bad as Chy’s,” Ginny tells Bernice Bechtold more than once. But it is bad, and it is exacerbated by other conditions, and her disease, having spread to her lungs and liver, is too diffuse for radiation. The chemotherapy she receives is not effective. She suffers periods of extreme pain. She spends most of September at Abbott Northwestern and undergoes two operations. She seems to improve a little, then regresses. There is hopeful talk among family and friends. Ginny, after all, is a fighter—she has been a fighter all her life. But the doctors know better. In late September, she goes home to die.

Bobby didn’t tell his longtime secretary about his own cancer and doesn’t tell her about Ginny’s. “He was very closemouthed about many things,” Vivian Meunier says to Harry, as if that would be news, a few years later.

Bobby hires twenty-four-hour nursing care for Ginny, and Ginny spends her final days in their pink master bedroom. She wears a bandana because the chemo has taken her hair, and she is heavily drugged with morphine for the pain. But she is often lucid, too. She has her nails done, and she sits up straight in bed when she has visitors. She has a wig, but she prefers the bandana, usually one of several colorful scarves that she keeps close at hand. Of the hair loss, she tells her sister-in-law, Catherine Knoblauch, “We’re all too impressed with ourselves. We’re all too vain.”

Her friends come to visit when she is up to it.

When Gata Snyder, who has been close since they were girls, arrives one midafternoon, Ginny tells the nurse to fix her pal a drink. Gata says she doesn’t care for a drink, but Ginny insists. “Of course you do,” Ginny says. “She wants a scotch,” and points to the bottle on the dresser.

Gata sits on the bed with a glass of whisky in her hand, unable to drink it, while Ginny sips a glass of water. Ginny asks Gata to light a cigarette and blow the smoke in her face. Who knows how many cigarettes the two of them have enjoyed together over the past fifty years, and now Ginny, who has finally and entirely too late rid herself of the habit, is delighted to breathe in the secondhand smoke. Gata tries to go when she thinks Ginny is worn out, but Ginny insists that she stay. Gata remains until nearly dinnertime, the two of them talking and laughing like old times, the large pink bed on which they sit floating in a fog of blue smoke.

Harry, who is single again at the time, believes he needs to assure Ginny that he is not without prospects. He has arranged to bring his current girlfriend, a woman he is quite serious about, to meet his mother. Ginny is primed for the occasion. She is wearing her wig and has had her nails freshly done (though, for some reason, on only one hand). Harry presents his new friend and shows his mother photos of the two of them enjoying each other’s company. The next day, Harry, who believes the meeting went very well, returns to his mother’s bedside. Ginny smiles sympathetically but tells him, “I’d go slow on this one.”

“And she was right,” Harry says years later, happily married to a different woman. “That relationship wasn’t right,” he says. “Mom saw through the charade.”

A few days later, family members believe that Ginny has reached the end. They tiptoe upstairs and gather around the bed as though for the last time. Then Ginny’s eyes flutter open. She sees her sniffling loved ones hovering over her and says, “What are you staring at? I’m not ready to go yet.”

David remembers sitting on the edge of her bed a day or two before she died. “I’d probably told her that I loved her and was probably crying,” he says. His mother said, “Always be kind. Always be kind and you’ll be fine.”

Bobby prays at her bedside, and maybe Ginny prays, too. Alice Schmitz, who has done her nails for many years and considers her a friend, tells Harry that, at her urging, Ginny began reading the Bible and thinking seriously about her uncertain faith. At one point during her final weeks, Alice says Ginny told her, “I’m not afraid anymore.”

On October 24, 1988, in a semicircle of family members, Virginia Piper dies at the age of sixty-five.

Bobby misses Ginny acutely, though he doesn’t talk much about his loss. Tad says, “They were best friends, lovers, and spouses, but there wasn’t much outward change in Dad.”

Bobby never says, not in his sons’ hearing anyway, that he believes that the kidnapping contributed to Ginny’s illness and relatively early death. But Tad, for one, believes that it did. “How could it not?” he says. “Stress is such a huge determinant in our lives. Her intensity level was more evident afterward. She drank and smoked more, and the expression on her face was more intense. She was carrying all the stress with her.”

The family decides to maintain some of her traditions, but will modify others. Christmas, for instance, was a major event for Ginny. She decorated the house from top to bottom and hosted a festive holiday party. Bobby and his sons agree that there is no way they can honor the holiday the way Ginny did, so Bobby, the boys, and their families spend their first Christmas without her in the Dominican Republic.

Bobby discusses with Abbott Northwestern’s leadership the idea of creating a state-of-the-art cancer center on the hospital’s south Minneapolis campus. Bobby, his family, and his company provide the first $2 million for the $12 million project.¹ Eventually, though, his energy is diminished by the return of his own cancer, in early 1990. The disease has spread from his prostate to his bones.

In April, in a frank, uncharacteristically expansive interview, he tells Star Tribune writer Martha Sawyer Allen, “I’m not afraid to die … I’ve been very fortunate in my life. I don’t feel I’d be cheated one bit if I dropped dead tomorrow.” What he fears, he says, is the kind of “very painful, protracted death” that his wife suffered, “not so much for me but because of my family and friends, those close to me.”

Bobby never goes to the hospital. His sons set up a hospital bed in the gallery overlooking the lawn and the little lake, and arrange for palliative care. Until his final days, he can get up and walk to his office with the tall windows looking out on the grounds and read or entertain the occasional visitor.

Bobby and his guests frequently talk about spiritual matters. It was never his intention to become a clergyman, but he remains a student of religion. He is well read and knowledgeable and still curious about the role of faith and belief in the lives of nations as well as individual men and women. His conversation usually runs to meaningful subjects. He says nothing about the kidnapping and its aftermath. “Not to me, anyway,” Tad says. And likely not to anyone else, either.

On August 19, 1990, not quite two years after his wife’s death, seventy-two-year-old Harry C. Piper Jr. dies at home with his family. His passing, like Ginny’s, is front-page news in Minneapolis. Unlike hers, however, Bobby’s headline in the Star Tribune emphasizes his estimable role in the community’s financial life, not the kidnapping. The abduction isn’t mentioned until deep into the jump, where Tad says, “We saw Dad exhibit remarkable courage and compassion during that anxious time … just as he did in the last days of his own life.”

¹ The Virginia Piper Cancer Institute officially opened in May 1991. “Dad was insistent that he not be included in the name,” says Harry. “He felt that he’d had enough recognition in his life. This was something for Mom.”