he told her. “Can you drink it out of the bottle?”
“No, George, she’s a lady, she needs a glass,” his wife said, and, after distributing the other bottles of Hamm’s, he left the room again. “George won’t admit it, but I know. Vic’s been dead a long time.”
“It seemed to us that he might be alive,” Michael said. “We—”
George Spitalny returned with a glass and gave it to Maggie with a long look. “Where’d a girl like you pick up such good English?”
“New York City.”
Blink.
“I came here when I was six.”
“Born over there in Vietnam, were you?”
“I was born in Formosa.”
Blink.
“I am Chinese.” Maggie was smiling so broadly Poole thought her cheek muscles must hurt.
“But you knew Victor.”
“I only heard about him.”
“Oh.” He was deterred for only a moment. “Think you’re ready for one of our good old Milwaukee suppers?”
“Not yet, George,” said his wife.
“You ever hear of the Glax Corporation, honey? One of the biggest outfits in the States. You ever hear about it over in China?”
Maggie’s expression of rapt interest did not waver.
“Circuit breakers. Big plant in the Valley. You probably saw it on the way over here. If you’re in town long enough, you oughta pay a visit, I’ll show you around, introduce you to everybody. How about that?”
“Very exciting,” Maggie said.
“Lots of good places around there, too—lots of surprises in this little old town.”
Poole watched George Spitalny leaning forward in his reclining chair, eating up Maggie Lah with his eyes. He had forgotten his wife and the two men. He felt great—he had heard unexpectedly good news about his son, he had a beer in one hand, and a girl who looked like Sex Incarnate was sitting on his living room couch. He was an awful man. He had burned Victor’s effects because of wounded narcissism. Poole felt an unexpected stab of pity for Victor Spitalny, growing up under the thumb of this vain, arrogant, inadequate man.
“What was Victor like as a boy?” he asked.
George Spitalny turned his face heavily, almost warningly toward Poole.
A look of pure cold indifference for his wife.
“Oh, Vic cried. All babies cry.”
“He was a big disappointment. Never had friends until he got to high school. Never made his grades. He wasn’t even any good at sports, like I thought he was gonna be. Here, I got something to show you.” He gave Maggie a tight, almost shy smile and stood up again and left the room. They could hear him rapidly climbing the stairs.
“You said that Vic might be alive?” Margaret Spitalny asked Poole.
“We think it might be a possibility.”
“There’s no record of his death,” Underhill said in a gentle voice. “He just disappeared. And he was in Thailand, so he could have just stayed there—or gone any of a dozen different places. He could have bought a new identity. You really haven’t had even a postcard from him since his disappearance?”
Heavy footsteps came thumping back down the stairs, and Margaret Spitalny shook her head and glanced at the door. Her hands had begun to tremble. “I don’t think—” She stopped speaking when her husband burst into the room, this time carrying a photograph in an old silver frame.
“Take a look at that, Maggie.” He thrust it at her. Margaret looked sidelong at Poole, then looked down into her lap.
“Better see to the supper.” She stood up and without looking at him moved around her husband, who was still grinning down at Maggie and breathing a little hard from his exertions on the stairs.
Poole moved closer to Maggie to look at the photograph. It was an old studio picture of a young man in a baseball uniform, posing with a bat in his hands. At eighteen or nineteen, George Spitalny had looked much like the son he would father—the same narrow head and widow’s peak. He was more muscular than Victor had been, however, sturdier, more forceful: the face was that of a young man as unpleasant as Victor, but in a completely different way.
“Not bad, huh? That was me, 1938. What do you think of that?”
Maggie made no comment, and Spitalny took her silence as an inability to find adequate words. “I don’t think I look too different now, even though it’s about fifty years later. Next year I hit my retirement, and I’m still in damn good shape.” He angled the photograph toward Michael for a moment, then toward Underhill before turning it back to Maggie. “That’s the way a young man ought to look. Right? Well, when I looked at my kid—I mean the day Vic was born, when they brought him out to me so I could see him, I looked down at this little baby, and I got this tremendous shock. Here I was thinking I would just love this kid, love him to death. Isn’t that supposed to be automatic? I thought that was supposed to be automatic. But I couldn’t feel anything, really. I couldn’t get over how goddamned ugly the kid was. Right away, I saw he was never gonna measure up to me. And you might call that psychic, or whatever, but I was right—he never did. Never. Not once. When he had that girlfriend in high school, that Debbie Maczik, I couldn’t figure out how he could hold onto a girl cute like that. Tell you the truth, I used to think she used to come around here to see me, more than she liked to see him.”
“Ready,” Margaret called from somewhere in the rear of the house.
George Spitalny let Maggie feast a while longer on the photograph, then set it down on top of the television. “You guys go on back to the kitchen and sit down. I gotta go to the little boy’s room.”
4
“And what happened when we finally saw the pictures?” Tim asked, smiling at Maggie in the backseat of the cab during their ride back to the hotel.
Michael too had been waiting to ask this question.
After their dinner—“Put some of the ketchup on your kielbasa, Maggie, it’s what we have here instead of soy sauce”—Mrs. Spitalny had finally gone upstairs and brought back from wherever they had been cached her pictures of Victor. Both Spitalnys had resisted showing these photographs, but when they had arrived George had taken charge, declaring some of them useless, others ridiculous, a few too ugly to be shown. In the end, they had been shown three photographs: one of a confused-looking boy of eight or nine on a bicycle, one of a teenage Victor leaning against the hood of an old black Dodge, and the third the standard end-of-basic-training yearbook photograph.
None of these precisely had resembled the Victor Spitalny remembered by Poole and Underhill. It was something of a shock that Victor Spitalny had ever looked as innocent as the boy in the warrior photograph. Leaning against the car with his arms crossed over his T-shirt, he looked surly but proud, for once in control of himself. In his pose was a long history of Elvis-worship. Oddly, it was the picture of the little boy that had most evoked the Victor Spitalny of Vietnam.
“Could you recognize him?” Michael asked.
Maggie nodded, but very slowly. “It had to be him. It was very dark in the loft, and the face in my memory has been getting vaguer and vaguer—but I’m pretty sure it was him. Also, the man I saw was crazy, and the boy in the pictures didn’t look crazy. But if I were a boy and had that man for a father, I’d be crazy too. He thought the worst thing about his son’s being a deserter was the injury it gave to his own ego.”
“You have those telephone numbers?” Underhill asked.
She nodded again. George and Margaret Spitalny had looked up the numbers of Bill Hopper and Mack Simroe, both of them now married, living in their old neighborhood and working in the Valley, and of Deborah Maczik Tusa. Tomorrow they would rent a car to go back to the South Side. Poole remembered the unfocused, inward-gazing expression of the unattractive little boy on his bicycle.
