THIRTY-TWO

AS WE stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, waiting for Anita to bring the car, he again pointed up to an overhanging camera but withheld comment, noticing that a doorman stood nearby watching him.

Sitting behind the wheel of her four-door blue Ford Escape hatchback, Anita waited while her husband squeezed his large body into the passenger seat, and I climbed in the back, and soon we were headed north along sparsely trafficked country roads bordered by cornfields, wheat fields, and stretches of uncultivated land that Gerald said was owned by speculators and was sometimes invaded by mountain lions, bears, skunks, and badgers, while above were Canadian geese flying in from the north.

Half turned around in his seat, Gerald directed my attention to other things that interested him, such as the lake where he and Anita often went fishing, and the Valero store where they bought gas and Anita knew the manager (“He’s from Nepal.”), and then we headed toward where the couple lived—a quiet community of neatly paved streets, manicured lawns, cul-de-sacs, rows of blue spruce trees, and high-end residences whose similarity in design made it difficult for Gerald and Anita to relocate their own home after they had first bought it and had driven to a real-estate office two miles away to sign the deed.

“On our way back we spent hours wandering all over this place looking for our house,” Gerald recalled. “We kept getting lost in and around all those cul-de-sacs. Finally we saw a guy in the street and I called to him, ‘Hey, we bought a house around here but can’t find it,’ and he said, ‘Oh, that also happened to me. Lots of these new houses look alike.’ I didn’t have a GPS then, but I had the address, and soon this guy sent us in the right direction.”

Anita paused before turning into the driveway of a large, modern green house with white trimming and stone facing and spruce trees in front. Gerald clicked a remote that opened the door of a three-car garage in which was parked a white Ford Fusion sedan, and hung along the walls of the garage was an orderly arrangement of household tools and fishing rods and also a mounted deer’s head and the bow and arrow with which Gerald said he shot the animal during a hunting trip years ago.

After entering the house from a side door in the garage, Gerald asked Anita to turn off the alarms and the laser beams in the basement, and he told me that his sports collection down there was valued at $15 million. He then led me through the dining area into a large living room with mahogany furniture and an eighty-inch television screen and several tall cabinets along the walls containing some of the eighty dolls that he and Anita had collected during their almost thirty years of marriage. I remember reading his notes describing his boyhood attraction to the dolls he saw in his aunt Katheryn’s bedroom, and how his mother diverted his interest from dolls to collecting baseball cards; but it occurred to me that after his marriage to Anita, the latter served as his proxy in drawing him back to dolls and acquiring some of these models I was now seeing in the living-room cabinets and elsewhere in the house.

As I stood next to him, he removed from a glass shelf a red-haired, green-eyed doll wearing a white lace dress and white shoes, and he said, “Anita and I were in Florida, and I had a picture of Anita when she was very young, and they made this doll right off that picture.” He went on to explain, “Every one of these dolls you see is totally porcelain, from the feet, through the body, everything,” and then he took in hand a pretty blue-eyed, blonde-haired doll measuring nearly three feet and said it was a one-of-a-kind product designed by the German doll maker Hildegard Günzel, who was known to collectors around the world. “We paid over $10,000 for this one,” he said.

At my request he pointed out some pictures of his aunt Katheryn that were among the framed photos of family members hanging along the walls. In one photo she is shown standing in a farmyard with her hands on her hips smiling at the camera.

Although she wore floppy trousers and a loose-fitting black lace blouse, the outlines of her curvaceous body were quite evident. There was also a photo near it showing Gerald as a farm boy, holding his dog within view of his aunt’s bedroom window. In addition, there were photos of his parents, Natalie and Jake, standing in front of the office of the Manor House Motel; and of Gerald and Anita in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria during a holiday visit to New York in 1991.

Upstairs, hanging on the walls of his office, were the license plates of some of the automobiles he used to drive—his Cadillacs, Lincolns, Thunderbirds. Encased in one corner of the room, next to his desk, was his gun collection—several rifles, shotguns, and boyhood BB guns; and on a shelf nearby were two German Lugers that he claimed to have gotten from an American colonel who had taken them from the home of the Nazi commander Hermann Göring. There was also a Japanese sword and scabbard that Gerald said he acquired at a home sale.

In a guest room next to his office were more of Anita’s porcelain dolls, a doll carriage, several of her Avanti-made stuffed animals, and dozens of glass figurines representing cats and other creatures—a menagerie occasionally joined by Anita’s two pet cats. All the women that Gerald Foos had been personally associated with were collectors, he said, adding that his first wife, Donna, had a very large stamp collection and “paid as high as a thousand dollars for one stamp.” Anita’s interests were not restricted to dolls, he went on, but included a coin collection as well as an accumulation of bottles of Velvet Collection wine from the Napa Valley bearing images of Marilyn Monroe on every bottle.

Ever since the couple had sold their motels, Anita devoted much of her free time to alphabetizing his millions of sports cards (ranging from one depicting Troy Aikman, former quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, to that of Chris Zorich, a onetime lineman with the Chicago Bears)—an “act of labor and love” on her part that Gerald proudly pointed out to me after we had stepped down into the basement.

Some of the sports cards were placed within the hundreds of photo albums that stood side by side along the multiple rows of bookshelves that lined all four walls of the subdivided basement, which had an eleven-feet-high ceiling and measured ­seventy-five by forty-five feet in total floor space.

In addition to those in the photo albums, there were hundreds of other cards exhibited individually within small stand-up acrylic frames that rested on or within the room’s many display cases.

As Gerald Foos slowly led me past the cases, he would sometimes pause, take hold of a certain card, and make comments about it.

“Here’s a rookie card of Michael Jordan,” Gerald said, adding that he purchased it at a flea market years ago from an ill-informed trader for only twenty dollars. Gerald then held up a card showing the baseball player Alex Rodriguez and admitted that it had dropped in value in recent years. “Here’s a guy—excuse my English—but he just pisses me off, because if he would have stayed away from steroids he would have probably been the greatest player in the world.”

After raising and praising the card of Hank Aaron, and then of Jackie Robinson, and then of the Detroit Lions’ Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders, who played during the 1990s, Gerald held a card that had come with a box of Cracker Jack candy, showing the Pittsburgh Pirates’ shortstop from the early 1900s, Honus Wagner. In one corner of the room were dozens of football helmets autographed by NFL stars—Joe Montana, Jim Brown, Len Dawson—and on the other side of the room, lined along four wooden shelves, were two hundred autographed baseballs that Gerald said were worth more than their weight in gold. Among the signatures were those of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Pete Rose. (“He should be in the Hall of Fame.”) Each ball was mounted on a small wooden stand with a brass plaque bearing the name of the player who signed the ball, and each ball was covered with a plastic globe that was slightly larger than the ball and protected it from fingerprints and other marks.

Neatly stacked on shelves above the rows of baseballs were dozens of Wheaties boxes, the covers of each featuring a famous athlete, among them John Elway of the Denver Broncos, Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers. Some of these unopened cereal boxes, such as the one with Lou Gehrig on the cover, were decades old.

“There must be generations of worms living in some of those boxes,” I said.

“Yes, and that makes them more valuable,” Gerald replied, with a smile.