“Dunky!” Robbie called to his brother in the other crib. Actually, the cribs were now beds with elaborate guardrails attached to keep the boys from falling out. The single rail hadn’t worked. Somehow they rolled over it and landed asleep on the floor, with loud clunks that roused Ward and Mary, but not the boys. Often they were left to sleep there till morning, until their pediatrician advised that could be bad for their spines.
“Mister moon-moon,” Duncan replied, pointing to the window and the bright orb outside in the trees.
“Here comes a man with a big shotgun! He’s gonna getcha if you start to run!” Robbie sang, echoing their bedtime song.
“Boom,” Duncan said, “I’m shooting the moon.”
“Shooting the moon” was an intriguing and confusing phrase they heard their parents use while playing a card game with Rusalka and Elbert.
They both quietly climbed out of their beds. Duncan watched Robbie empty out his boxes of toy soldiers and arrange them in the moonlight on the floor, cannons and rifles all aimed at the window. Robbie made “pow-pow” firing sounds. They stepped over to the window to see the effects of the barrage.
“Bald like Gonga,” Duncan observed, of the moon. They knew that Gonga and Meemo were dead. They hadn’t figured out what that really meant.
“Can the moon shoot back?” Robbie wondered aloud.
Acting on behalf of the bald moon, Duncan turned, pulled down his pajamas, and peed on Robbie’s army of toy soldiers. Robbie laughed. He thought it was funny, although he knew Duncan was also making a statement about his bath toys.
Duncan adored his bath toys—rubber boats and whales and alligators. He preferred them to soldiers, or any other kind of toy. It bothered him when grownups insisted that bath toys had to stay in the bathroom, because the grownups foolishly explained, “that way the bath toys will be there when you want them.” He wanted his bath toys all the time.
“In a flood,” Duncan said, “my toys would save yours.”
Meemo’s bathroom at the far end of the hall had not been used since she died. Flooding Meemo’s bathroom would probably be viewed as bad, but since she wasn’t around to tell them no, how bad could their flood experiment be? They tiptoed cautiously down the hall, past their parents’ bedroom, past their big brother’s bedroom, dragging their respective gear.
Ward and Mary and Constance and Anthony awoke to a noise that Anthony thought was the sound of a nuclear attack. It was the plaster ceiling in the dining room collapsing. The cost of repairing the ceiling and the upstairs hallway floor and the guest bedroom adjacent to Meemo’s bathroom came to several thousand dollars. It was only the first of many such expenses incurred by these two boys, who Mary’s parents proclaimed to be far more badly behaved than their son, Robert, had ever been.
Every decade seems to produce child experts and theories about children. The 1960s produced a crop. For instance: when a mother playing with her child holds up a toy truck and says, “truck,” and the next day the child holds up the toy and says, “truck,” do not blindly assume that the child has learned the word ‘truck.’ Instead, imagine the child has learned that somewhere out in the universe exists a relationship between the object in his hand and the sound coming out of his mouth, and most importantly, that one other person also knows this secret. Language, for the child, is participation in a secret.
True enough for Robbie and Duncan. Secrets were their lifeblood. A few of theirs from this period: the president does not like to wear hats, and neither do we. Mama and Daddy cannot see the thoughts inside us. Grandma Loretta smells. Grandpa Fred has an eye in the back of his head. A really big war happened and now everything is better, except with the Commies, and that’s why we have that hole in the backyard, just in case. The dog likes Anthony better than us. But we have to be nice to the dog, because we need her to help us dig to the center of the earth, before we shoot her up into space, like the Commies. Our real friends live on the island in Maine, except for Vincent and Kayla, but they can’t come with us because Vincent gets sick in cars. Something bad happened to the president. It could be because he wasn’t wearing a hat. Anthony pees in his bed. We are just the same as animals, even if Mama says, “No, you are human beings, not animals.”
The local attitude toward the youngest Wangert boys was very similar to America’s view toward the ’60s: “Where the hell did this come from?” Together with Vincent and Kayla, they played awful tricks on babysitters. They lured the church group’s preschoolers into the bomb shelter for naked hide-and-seek. They broke into one of the vacant white-flight houses near the Stark residence and scrawled swear words on the walls. They could not even be trusted with sidewalk chalk. Robbie and Duncan quickly belied Ward’s belief that parenting fully biological children would be easier.
“Do you think I should put them in separate bedrooms?” Mary asked Rusalka.
They sat drinking coffee in Mary’s kitchen, attempting to supervise the ruckus in the basement. The kids hammered, hammered, hammered. They banged on old 2x4s from the doghouse project, and on Ward’s abandoned Soapbox Derby entry. The dog cowered under the table. When the sound turned metallic, Mary yelled down the basement stairs, “NO hammering on the furnace!”
“You could try, yes, separate bedrooms as experiment,” Rusalka nodded, “and remember, as my Elbert says, experiments never fail—just provide information. The boys will probably fight you on it.”
Initially labeled a gold-digger and now a spawner of hellions, Mary appreciated Rusalka’s unfettered acceptance of her difficult kids. She also welcomed Rusalka’s influence over them. As part of her ongoing Americanization, Rusalka read comic books and could talk to the boys about the unique powers of Plastic Man and Wonder Woman. Rusalka hinted that her own long, manicured red fingernails held special powers. One sharp snap of her fingers and Robbie and Duncan stopped whatever they were doing. Her stories of tapeworms in the old country made an impression. All she had to say was, “Put shoes on, or you get tapeworm!” and they complied.
In turn, Rusalka was grateful for Mary’s tolerance of her offspring. Rusalka tried desperately to normalize Vincent and Kayla with Red Ball Jets and Suzie Homemaker and a tire swing in their front yard. Vincent never learned to tie his shoes. Kayla continued eating dirt, which Rusalka explained away as a vitamin deficiency, even after the doctor diagnosed her with pica. The cruel caste system of the neighborhood children permanently marked Vincent and Kayla as “retards,” and the Wangert boys were their only regular playmates.
Ward unwittingly fed their ostracism with an attempt at parental involvement borrowed from his late father. Ward took the children to the A&P supermarket to note the prices on fruits and vegetables. Then he drove them downtown to the farmers’ market and gave each kid two dollars to buy produce to fill up their red wagons. They pulled the wagons around the neighborhood, selling the fruits and vegetables door to door for a quarter more than they paid the farmers, but still underselling the A&P, and thus learning an important lesson about profit margins.
The separate bedroom experiment lasted three weeks. “It wasn’t so much that they fought us on it,” Mary explained to Rusalka. “They did try to sneak back and forth at night and Ward and I lost some sleep. It was more about a change in their moods.”
“You mean, when they apart?” Rusalka asked.
“At first we thought Robbie was accepting it fine. Ward pitched it to him as a big-boy move. He’d go into his room at naptime and close the door. But you know Robbie. He’s not exactly a quiet child. We’d stand outside his door and hear nothing. No sound at all. I’d peek in and find him just sitting on the floor in the corner.”
“Same with Duncan?”
“No, he was different. Duncan got agitated. There were plenty of noises coming from his room, and it was usually things being ripped. He tore all the pages out of his Bible Stories coloring book.”
“I wonder what Dr. Keller would think,” Rusalka said.
“We finally decided it was doing more harm than good,” Mary sighed, “Robbie and Duncan are their own little planet and the rest of our family just orbits around them.”
“Why you not go see Dr. Keller again?” Rusalka asked.
Mary fumbled for something in her purse. They were walking along the canal towpath. She pulled out a bag of breadcrumbs for the children to feed to the ducks.
“He’s not a child psychologist,” Mary said.
“No, but very smart. My Vincent and Kayla, always vomiting in cars and trains, so we can never travel anywhere. Dr. Keller connected it to a reaction to my nomadic, refugee years, always on the move.”
“I felt like he was going to pry everything out of me,” Mary said, “and I wasn’t ready for that. Besides, I get all the psychoanalysis I need from you.”
Rusalka smiled and pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose. “Ah, Mary Wangert, pure as snow. What is there to pry from you? Where is the darkness in you? The things I could tell you.”
“But you never do,” Mary said.
Rusalka winced and lit a cigarette. “I very scared,” she replied, “and don’t remember much. Dr. Keller helped me with what he calls ‘dissociation.’ The mind—it ignores pain that is too much.”
Mary said, “That might explain my own fuzziness about certain things in the past.”
“In Moscow?” Rusalka asked.
“Yes, in Moscow,” Mary groaned .
Not until the 1970s, when she first heard the term “date rape,” did her mind produce a clearer memory.
They spent after-school time at Rusalka’s house—the ‘Spaceship House,’ where everything was transcendently new. Mary’s kids behaved slightly better. Their destructive tendencies were curbed by awe. The house was built by a retired Lustron executive, who spent his career fabricating kits for boxy, steel houses. In this structure, he took it up a notch. Glass walls, steel arches, chrome and leather furniture, tiled floors, Bakelite veneers. Pocket-style doors wired to open and close with the touch of a button.
Anthony and Robbie and Duncan, far from regarding Vincent and Kayla as retards, envied their life of luxury. They were allowed to drink 7 Up all day. Their shelves were stocked with the best cereals, including Lucky Charms. They ate TV dinners. Nobody in their house called the TV an ‘idiot box.’ Their mom watched cartoons with them. And their father brought home Chinese food with chopsticks.
At the back of the house, just off the garage, was a padlocked room with a ‘keep out’ sign on the door. Vincent and Kayla called it a “darkroom.” It had something to with their mother’s camera hobby. Robbie and Duncan, undeterred, smuggled over a screwdriver from their basement tool-chest. The kids suffered the full wrath of Rusalka’s red fingernails and tapeworm threats when they were caught removing the padlock.
That night, under punitive cross-examination from their parents, Robbie and Duncan reported getting a peek at the contents of the darkroom. The equipment still in boxes. No chemicals. No pictures or negatives. Nothing else in the room, except for a typewriter with lots of crumpled carbon paper on the floor. It was hard to know what to believe with these cretins. They fibbed a lot.
On the subject of their scientist father, Vincent and Kayla told enormous fibs. Vincent claimed his father invented a laser beam more powerful than an “adam-bomb.” Kayla said her father invented invisible ink. Robbie and Duncan sort of wanted to believe it. They were very impressed by a framed studio portrait of Elbert Jones in a shiny white lab coat that stared down from atop the big TV set in the living area. They repeatedly suggested to their own father, whose struggles at work since Gonga died were becoming more evident, that he should wear a lab coat.
Robbie and Duncan bragged that the antique weapons hanging on the walls of their dad’s office were booty from his victims in battle. More poignantly, they also spouted a mistaken belief that their father’s black armband was a bandage for a war-wound.
Although traditional public expressions of mourning were on the wane by 1960, the widowed Constance Wangert insisted on full mourning costume to honor the memory of her late husband. The old man deserved it. Ward Jr. wore a black suit for six months and then the black armband for an additional year.
Ironically, it did have a wounding effect. So many people came up to him on the street to express their condolences. Ward recognized he would never fill his father’s shoes socially and that those connections were critical for his business. His secretary copied his father’s voluminous address book into a new Rolodex. Ward sent out five hundred Christmas cards with a family portrait, the kids in gray shorts and blazers.
Aside from Ace Properties and a few offshoots from their growth, Ward was not bringing in many new clients. He took over the daily job of polishing the Fat Man and Little Boy bronzes with his handkerchief, as if rubbing a lamp for a genie. He sat in his father’s chair at the office and looked out across the Statehouse grounds to the statue of his grandfather and wondered where he might be now, if only he’d accepted a long-ago offer from He Who Remains Classified. He indulged in thoughts of phoning his old secret-society brother to ask if the C.I.A. might still have any openings in, say, Paris or Rome for a thirty-ish husband and wife with three kids and a dog and some goldfish.
Ward did attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps. He frequented Ernesto’s barbershop and listened patiently to the UFO stories. He endured the earlobe nicks from Ernesto’s trembling hands and the well-meaning introductions to the other patrons as “Big Ward’s little boy.” He bought an eye-catching family car, a Checker Cab, and painted a ‘Wangert Public Relations’ sign on the side. He designed a flashy logo. He pinned business cards to bulletin boards. He revived the social tradition of attending every home football game at Indiana University.
The Wangerts possessed box seats in perpetuity, because Roscoe Sr. —Ward’s great-grandfather—had been the first coach at I.U., after graduating from Yale in 1884. Roscoe came home to Indiana with some knowledge about this new game that everyone in the hinterlands wanted to learn. He established one of the great losing traditions in college football. Ward instructed his children: “Rooting for a losing team builds character and teaches you how to focus on the achievements of individual players.”
Ward discovered a paradoxical sense of calm solitude among the crowds at the sporting events he attended with his clients and his children. For a few blessed hours the struggles on the court or field were not his own, and while nervous fans chewed their fingernails, Ward contented himself during many a fourth quarter with the thought, “Not my problem.”
The social payoff at the I.U. football games for Ward was being recognized by the large number of businessmen who motored down to Bloomington on autumn Saturdays. Ward patronized the reunion tents. Later in the week, back up in Indianapolis, someone would wave to him from across the street, remarking on a big play or the fine weather last weekend.
And his family seemed to enjoy the outings to the quaint stadium on Tenth Street. Robbie and Duncan and Vincent and Kayla ran around under the bleachers, eating fallen potato chips. Anthony sat buried in his latest book about the Manhattan Project. Mary and Rusalka huddled together, happily oblivious to the game. Ward sat next to Elbert, who claimed to be a football fan, and unfortunately, was vocal on the subject. A perfectionist in a lab coat, Elbert (a native of South Bend) could only focus on the faults of the home team.
“I wonder if we can manage to lose by two touchdowns today,” Elbert said. Or, “That lousy quarterback can probably kick better than he can throw. They should just punt on first down.”
Ward began to notice a deeper bond forming between Mary and Rusalka. He assumed that he and his wife still shared the common view of Rusalka and Elbert Jones as oddball eccentrics. Little by little, Mary no longer laughed at Ward’s jokes about Rusalka’s latest affectation—her platinum blonde hair and Coca-Cola cakes. Mary told Ward to stop pressing Rusalka for details about her refugee experience.
Ward felt displaced from his role as Mary’s confidante and regretted having no male counterpart. Glancing out from his mezzanine office on a Christmas Eve, he saw two women with shopping bags laughing gaily as they struggled to light each other’s cigarettes in the afternoon breeze. One woman pulled a camera out of her purse and snapped a close-up of her friend. Ward felt a pang of anonymous jealousy, just before realizing that the two women were, in fact, Mary and Rusalka. A not uncommon experience—needing a moment to recognize a familiar face out of context—and yet disturbing for Ward, who had never viewed his spouse as a stranger.
His pang deepened at the memory of a similar experience with Meemo. He was ten or twelve, whenever it was that his parents finally allowed him to ride a bike alone. Near Fall Creek, he noticed a mother and a boy waiting for a trolley, the Negro mother lovingly tending to the nose-blowing of the small Negro boy. Ward suddenly realized that the mother was Meemo and the child was her real son, and in that moment came a jarring realization that the world was not what it seemed.
Likewise, something felt wrong here too. He sensed something off about Rusalka being a photographer. The darkroom story lingered in his mind. A darkroom full of unused equipment, except for a typewriter …. Where did all her rolls of exposed film go?
Ward’s growing frustration, coupled with Rusalka’s continued stonewalling on the exact nature of her connection to Madame Marlovsky and her rather direct inquiries about Mary’s time in Moscow, finally led him to place a long distance call to Washington, D.C.
He was in the bar at the Morace—fortunately his eviction from the hotel did not include the bar. He listened in on Stu and Randy expounding on their Air Force duty during World War II, which included guarding a depot near Kokomo where material was flown to the Soviet Union during Lend-Lease. Stu claimed that many Russians disembarked unchallenged from the return flights. “They were sent to gather info from our factories and our brass was too chicken-shit to stop them, because we didn’t want to piss off Stalin, and we figured they were just poor peasants who wanted to learn how to manufacture light bulbs.”
Ward impulsively turned to the barkeep and exchanged a bill for a pocketful of quarters. Digging out a faded phone number on a scrap of envelope from deep inside his wallet, he dialed without knowing exactly what he was going to say. He felt like a McCarthy-ite informer. A State Department official answered the phone and took his name and put him on hold. He was passed around and transferred to a different office. He was told his call would be returned. It never came. Ward’s emotional upheaval was only exacerbated by the rude discovery that he no longer rated phone contact with his secret-society brother.