Hunter's Moon Read online

  They eloped about a week before he shipped out. That was the story they’d told, the story their kids believed all their lives, until Jeff and one of his sisters, Jennifer, discovered it wasn’t true.

  He hands the photo back to his father, who sticks it in a greeting-card envelope and into his jacket pocket.

  “Good thing this breakfast is free. That’s the right price,” Hal says, stabbing the scrambled eggs with his fork. “They’re rubbery as nutty-putty. Powdered eggs. Just like the eggs they dished out in the service.”

  He makes one of his distinctive gestures, a little bit of a wave, a little bit of a swat, that expresses his disgust not only with his breakfast but with the world in general. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has been right since his wife’s death.

  “Powdered eggs on a plastic plate, and you eat them with a plastic fork. Everything’s artificial.”

  “Finish up, Dad. We need to get going.”

  “What’s your rush? If that beach is still there, it’s still there. It’s not going anywhere.”

  Hal is a contrarian even with himself. Instead of taking his time, he digs in and in about two minutes polishes off the inferior eggs, the substandard sausage patties, and the English muffin, which he gives a one-star customer review.

  * * *

  Near Green Bay, Jeff leaves the interstate to follow a two-lane westward. The road is an artifact from the days of tailfins and chrome bumpers, and the towns it passes through are likewise relics, each one with a sign directing travelers to its HISTORIC BUSINESS DISTRICT, where little in the way of buying and selling is conducted nowadays, commerce having long since migrated to the malls in larger towns or to the Internet. Patches of woods flash by; harvested cornfields mown to stubble or with stalks still standing, dry and brown. They are cultivated by corporate farmers, those fields. The family farms he remembers from his boyhood, when his father took him on hunting trips, vanished years ago.

  The last pilot Jeff pitched for a new crime series set in El Paso died in the womb. Not edgy enough, the network execs said. Would’ve been fine in the eighties, but now it would come off as quaint. And sometimes did he detect, in the way the industry’s young, tech-savvy up-and-comers spoke to him, a kind of respectful condescension? Two shows he’d produced for cable had been nominated for Emmys; but, like an aging quarterback, he was esteemed for past glories, emphasis on “past.”

  His father’s voice intrudes.

  “Wausau. That’s where we lived the summer after Gogebic.” He flaps a hand at a highway sign: CLINTONVILLE 9 MI. WAUSAU 65 MI. “You wouldn’t remember. That boardinghouse I had to put us in till I found a rental. Loggers stayed there when they came out of their winter camps, and—”

  “Mom was pregnant with Jerry and the only woman in the place, besides the old lady who ran it,” Jeff interrupts to remind Hal that this is another tale he’s heard before. “Everybody ate at the same table, and the lumberjacks couldn’t take their eyes off Mom, but they were real gentlemen. Never made any moves on her, never used bad language in front of her.”

  “I’d be at work, she’d be taking care of you. Nobody to talk to except that old lady. But she made the best of it. You remember that cabin on Lake Chetek? You gotta remember that. You weren’t a baby by then.”

  “I was eleven.”

  They fall into a call-and-response.

  “No indoor plumbing. A jack-handle pump over the sink,” Hal says.

  “The outhouse stunk. Shit and lime.”

  “Power going out in storms. Kerosene lamps at night.”

  “And bears knocking over our garbage cans.”

  “She made the best of that, too. Sometimes I felt rotten, putting her through all that, a girl who’d grown up in a house with four bathrooms and a cook and a maid.”

  Hal had been a semi-itinerant machinist for the Standard Container Company, working in its Detroit plant in the winter, on the road from May to October, journeying to canneries and breweries in Wisconsin and Michigan to service the machinery that filled Standard’s cans with the land’s bounty, its bottles with beer. In June, his wife and children joined him, spending their summers in whatever place he’d found to rent in whatever territory he’d been assigned. And that was how the lawyer’s daughter had gone from a life with a cook and a maid to the Wausau boardinghouse and a succession of cabins and cottages in the sticks.

  “She was a saint to put up with it,” Hal rolls on. “If I’d gone to college on the G.I. Bill, got an engineering degree, I’d’ve given her a better life.”

  “Well, you did later on, in your own way.” The beatifying of his mother somehow annoys Jeff. “Hey, can we make a pact not to talk and talk about Mom for the rest of the trip?”

  “You don’t want to talk about your own mother?”

  “I want you to get your mind off her for a little while.”

  “Jesus H.! We were married for sixty-one years! And I’m supposed to get my mind off her?”

  Sixty years, Jeff thinks.

  He and Jennifer had been going through their mother’s things after the funeral, deciding what to keep, what to give or throw away, when she came across some old letters, bundled in a shoebox with a marriage certificate, signed by a justice of the peace and dated October 17, 1945, soon after Hal returned from overseas.

  “Well, holy sweet Jesus. I always knew you were a bastard, now I can prove it,” Jennifer said after they read the letters, those from their mother bearing the return address of Evangeline Home for Girls.

  He was surprised but not shocked. In fact, because he’d always considered his parents boringly conventional, it thrilled him to find documented evidence of one kink in their otherwise ruler-straight lives. Drama being his business, he couldn’t resist casting a cinematic light on them and himself, the love child born of a wartime romance.

  What did shock him was the secret concealed by the secret of their marriage, the box within the box. Ellen’s father had cloistered her, expecting that she would give up her baby for adoption. It seemed that she and Hal agreed that that would be best. Then, only weeks before her due date, she’d had a change of heart, writing that she couldn’t go through with the adoption, Daddy’s wishes be damned, Daddy be damned. Jeff could almost hear the plea that she’d been too demure, or too wise, to state directly. Hal wrote back from the battlefield, pledging to do the right thing as soon as he got home.

  That explained why the Havlicek children had seen so little of their maternal grandparents when they were growing up: their father had compounded the sin of knocking up Roland Fancher’s baby girl by marrying her. But the find raised more questions than it answered. Did Hal feel that he’d been trapped into marriage? And what would his, Jeff’s, life have been like if he’d been adopted? And did his parents perpetuate their fiction of elopement not because they were ashamed of his illegitimate birth but to hide the fact that they’d been willing, almost up to the moment he came into the world, to give him up?

  “Don’t you dare ask him; don’t you even think of mentioning we’ve seen this stuff,” Jennifer said, drawing a finger across her lips. “Promise?”

  * * *

  They drive without talking into Clintonville, then turn north on U.S. 45. After another sign appears—GOGEBIC 10 MI.—Hal breaks the silence.

  “Y’know, I’m not sure you ever appreciated your mother the way you should.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “You didn’t cry at her funeral. And that eulogy you gave. It sounded like … You sounded like…”

  “A newscaster reading the obituary of somebody he didn’t know. You’ve told me that. More than once.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jeff catches the movement—the half wave, half swat—and it comes to him that his failure to show sufficient sorrow—another of his shortcomings as a son—is what the old man has been leading up to all along.

  “I didn’t get all choked up because I was relieved that she didn’t have to suffer anymore,” he explains, bothered that he has to, know
ing that his reasons were more complicated than that.

  “She wasn’t suffering. She didn’t know what the hell was going on. Maybe you were relieved that you wouldn’t have to fly in from New York every month to visit her.”

  Jeff feels a flush of anger, which he represses. “Are you trying to piss me off?” is all he says.

  “We piss each other off.”

  There isn’t the slightest suggestion in Hal’s remark that things could ever be any different between them.

  The time when they were different has been all but lost to memory. Jeff has fuzzy recollections of himself as a small boy, running to the front door when his father came off the road in the fall, crying out, “Daddy’s home!” and feeling the strong hands raise him into the air, the stubbled cheek rubbing his. Or, some years later, calling from curbside as he watched Hal march in a Memorial Day parade, “Hey, Dad! Over here!” to make him turn so others would see the medals arrayed on his chest, the proud shine of the “V”-for-Valor device pinned to his Bronze Star.

  * * *

  At a gas-station convenience store in Gogebic, Jeff picks up a map of the lake. They drive around it for the next hour; it isn’t small—twenty miles of shoreline, the map notes. Hal sees nothing familiar, no landmarks to jog his memory. All he remembers is that the lakeshore was less developed in 1946; now it’s ringed by resorts, cottages, summer homes. He falls into a morose silence, feeling disappointed and cheated. Jeff, determined to come through for him, despite his misgivings about this expedition, returns to the convenience store with the map and the photograph.

  “The woman inside said it’s probably the beach at the county park,” he says when he’s back in the car. He opens the map and points to a spot on the north side of the lake. “She told me we probably missed it because you can’t see it from the main road.”

  It takes a quarter of an hour to drive to the park. Hal gets out of the truck in stages: he plants one foot firmly on the ground and holds on to the open door to make sure he has his balance before he tries the other foot. His first few steps are a shuffle, until he’s worked the stiffness out of his knees and is able to pick up a stride.

  They walk through a campground for trailers and RVs—only one site is occupied, by a camper-truck—and onto the beach. It, too, is deserted, except for a young couple scanning the lake with binoculars. “Oh! Goldeneyes,” the woman says, pointing at ducks paddling in a reed bed. Birdwatchers.

  Hal shambles to the water’s edge and looks up and down the shoreline and across the lake. Rippled by a light breeze under the dull November sky, it resembles a sheet of corrugated tin.

  “So is this it?” Jeff asks.

  His father nods, then calls out, “Ellen, it’s Jeff and me. Do you see us?”

  Lowering her binoculars, the young woman turns toward him. “Pardon?”

  Hal ignores her and starts walking along the beach. She throws a puzzled look at Jeff, who pauses and signals her, with a flutter of his hand, to pay no attention.

  “I thought he was talking to me,” she says. “My name is Helen.”

  “It’s Ellen. He said Ellen,” Jeff answers, without explaining that Ellen is a ghost.

  He catches up with his father, still engaged in the one-way conversation. He’s telling the ghost that he found it … the beach on Lake Gogebic where their oldest took his first steps …

  Jerry had prepared him for something like this. He’ll be watching TV or eating dinner, whatever, and he’ll start talking to her. It’s like a séance, except the spirit doesn’t answer. But Jeff was not to be alarmed; their father wasn’t losing touch with reality. He’ll say a few words to her, then snap out of it and go back to whatever he was doing.

  And as Hal falls into small talk—the weather, what he’d seen on the drive, the motel’s crummy breakfast, sounding as if he’s on the phone—Jeff is not alarmed, just a little anxious that if he allows him to go on much longer, the old man will lose touch with reality.

  “Okay, we got here,” Jeff interrupts. “Mission accomplished. Let’s get back on the road.”

  Hal hesitates, glancing up at migrating ducks strung out like tendrils of drifting smoke. Then he turns on his heel and heads off, back toward the birdwatchers.

  “Why in the hell did God have to take her before me?”

  Jeff is unsure if the question is addressed to him and if he’s expected to reply.

  Suddenly, tossing his head backward, Hal shouts at the sky in a quavering treble, “You sonofabitch! Why did you take her? Goddamn you!” then falls to his knees, sobbing.

  For this, Jeff isn’t prepared. His father doesn’t believe in the deity he’s cursing, nor has he ever been given to such extravagant, and public, displays. The couple stare in the perplexed, embarrassed way people do when they see a madman raving on the street.

  Jeff hisses, “Dad, for Chrissake…”

  He goes on, weeping and hurling epithets at an unjust God.

  “Stop it! Get hold of yourself!”

  Hal chokes out a “go to hell,” and Jeff is immediately ashamed to have spoken so harshly. Because he now sees why his father insisted that they come to this place. It’s for the same reason he won’t sell the house haunted by her absence. He must, must, rip at the scab and make the wound bleed afresh. It’s a way of keeping her alive.

  Jeff slips his hands under Hal’s arms and attempts to pull him to his feet. It’s like trying to lift a sack of concrete—Hal weighs in at 220 pounds. The young man, a bulky guy in a quilted vest, takes a step toward them. “Can I help?” Jeff waves him off, and just then, as abruptly as he’d lost it, Hal recaptures his composure. He stands and brushes the sand off his knees and says in a hoarse whisper, “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  On the drive north, he dozes fitfully. His head droops; he snores and twitches, then opens his eyes, looks around for a few moments, and nods off again. Grateful for the silence, Jeff heads up U.S. 45 and crosses the state line into the U.P. He’s mulling over the outburst on the beach. Maybe it wasn’t as out of character as he’d first thought. It’s natural for Hal to be angry with God; he’s been angry for as long as Jeff can remember—and perhaps not without reason. His best friend died in his arms as their squad of engineers bridged some contested river in France.

  On nights after work, he toiled in the garage behind the family’s bungalow in Livonia, hunched over a draftsman’s board papered with mechanical drawings, or turning out parts on his lathe, grinding them mirror smooth, measuring tolerances with his micrometer. He came up with a few improvements to canning equipment, submitted his ideas to Standard Container, and was rewarded with modest bonuses, mentions in the company house organ. He’d hoped for more, like a promotion off the shop floor into the engineering department, but it never materialized. When he wasn’t kicking himself for not going to school on the G.I. Bill, he fumed about the college boys in the front office, toward whom he felt a combustible mixture of envy and contempt. Thought they were so goddamn smart just because they had a piece of paper.

  After he designed a new machine, there in the garage—it would manufacture milk and juice cartons faster than anything else in the industry—he took a leap into the dark. He applied for a patent, quit the company, and started his own firm, HH Engineering. But the leap was preceded by a distasteful step: he begged his father-in-law for start-up capital. Hal’s argument—if his venture was successful, Ellen would have the life her father thought she deserved—persuaded Roland Fancher.

  He set up shop in an abandoned warehouse off Eight Mile Road, hired a couple of machinists and tool-and-die makers, and poured out torrents of sweat for the next few years. He missed his sons’ Little League games and his daughters’ recitals and hardly ever took a day off (opening day of deer season an exception). He couldn’t keep up with orders, hired more employees, then expanded into designing bottling equipment for microbreweries and midsize soft-drink companies. A million dollars in revenue, then five, then twelve …

  Hal moved the family
out of the Livonia bungalow into a ten-room house on an acre and a half in Bloomfield Hills. The Georgian with its white-pillared portico and fairway of a lawn had three bathrooms instead of four, no cook, and a cleaning lady in place of a live-in maid—but it was proof in brick and stone that he’d climbed the ladder to Roland’s rung.

  But if her restoration to privilege made any difference to Ellen, she didn’t show it. Maybe she’d known all along that it had never been about her.

  Success did do two things to Hal: it honed his sharp edges outside the home and made him an autocrat within it. As the story has come down to Jeff, Hal flew to St. Louis to pay off the loan in person. But he and his father-in-law, more alike than either of them would care to admit, vied for who could be more ungracious. “This is from the son of bohunk immigrants,” Hal said, handing over the check. Roland said that stealing his daughter was a debt that could never be repaid, to which Hal replied, “Well, we’re square now. And you can go to hell.”

  Beneath his own roof, Hal mandated what the family would eat for dinner and which TV programs they would watch and, on the rare occasions when he took them to movies, which films they would see. He never raised his voice to his wife, was always protective and solicitous toward her, but, many years later, Jeff heard her complain that as a girl she’d lived under a father’s tyranny, as a woman under a husband’s benign dictatorship.

  For his children, it wasn’t so benign. They were afraid of him, afraid of the loaded silences that often came after he’d suffered one of his war nightmares and the quick bursts of temper—“Hal-storms,” they called them—as well. And they always felt his hand when they acted up or sloughed off in school.