The Most Dangerous Animal of All Read online

Once his family was settled, Earl submitted his application to the Corps and waited eagerly for his acceptance letter. While he waited, Earl acquainted himself with his new parishioners, many of whom were happy to turn to him for guidance and prayer as they proudly and fearfully watched their sons go off to war.

  Earl soon received his letter of acceptance and headed off to Williamsburg, Virginia, where he would eventually earn his degree from the U.S. Army Chaplain School. He then joined the Navy as a chaplain, determined to give spiritual guidance and counsel to young soldiers who were putting their lives on the line for America. He moved up quickly, earning the rank of lieutenant, and was assigned to the USS Altamaha, an escort aircraft carrier, under the command of Admiral “Bull” Halsey. His primary role was to give comfort and inspiration through his message of hope and salvation.

  When he wasn’t ministering, Earl worked as an intelligence officer, tasked with tracking and deciphering the enemy’s coded messages. Because he could read and write Japanese and German, Earl soon became an asset to his unit. During World War II, the U.S. Navy and Army utilized a complex cipher machine called SIGABA to write American codes. This machine proved to be a valuable asset, because SIGABA codes were unbreakable, whereas Japanese codes, called PURPLE, and German codes, written with a machine called Enigma, could easily be deciphered by the Americans. The U.S. military had another advantage when passing along secret information not meant for enemy eyes: American Indian Code Talkers, comprising Navajo, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Comanche Indians, among others, who used the arcane language of their forefathers to create intricate codes. There were so many dialects in the languages that no one in the Axis forces could crack the codes.

  Earl loved serving his country, but back home, angry that her husband had left her with his sister and the children, Gertrude fumed. Like Louise had years before, Aileen and Bits quickly learned to stay out of her way. So did Van. He hid in his small room at the back of the house, wishing that his father would hurry back. He didn’t like his cousins. They laughed at his books, his music.

  My grandmother, desperate for some fun, began concocting this reason or that for why she needed to be away from the house in the afternoons. Estelle wasn’t fooled when she saw Gertrude’s hair swept up in a bow and the pretty dresses she wore. Word soon got to Earl that his wife was fornicating with members of his congregation, but he had God’s work to do. He would deal with her as soon as he had fulfilled his obligation to the military.

  A few months later, Earl traveled back to South Carolina to straighten out his errant wife.

  “Look, Gertrude,” Earl yelled, placing his Bible in front of her, “right there in Hebrews, chapter thirteen, verse fourteen, it says, ‘Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.’ Do you want to be judged as an adulteress?”

  Gertrude tearfully shook her head. “I don’t know what comes over me,” she cried.

  Earl didn’t know, either.

  “I’m a minister, for God’s sake. My wife is supposed to be a pillar of the community.”

  He begged and pleaded with his wife to be faithful, and when that didn’t work, he screamed at her. Nothing he did mattered. Gertrude craved more attention than her husband could give her.

  Things got so bad that Gertrude would weep when Earl pulled up in the driveway. It was a strange dichotomy. On Sundays, he would stand in the pulpit preaching the gospel, and Gertrude would sit at the piano, playing hymns beautifully, smiling as she praised God. They looked like such a happy family, but no one was fooled. Earl didn’t have to ask which men who sat in the pews of his church had slept with his wife. He knew. He could tell by the way they averted their eyes when he looked at them and spoke about sin. He struggled to forgive Gertrude for her transgressions, but she just transgressed some more.

  To take his mind off his problems, Earl focused on my father. Back then, most children did not have a television to occupy their time, so they either stayed outdoors playing ball or inside playing board games, word games, tic-tac-toe, and checkers. When my grandfather was home on leave from the Navy, he began teaching Van how to write and solve simple codes using numbers, Japanese symbols, and German and English lettering. Van was a good student, often deciphering his father’s encrypted messages quickly. Earl was impressed and endeavored to make each new one more difficult than the last. Before long, Van was creating his own codes and asking his father to break them. Van would watch from a corner of the room while Earl worked his way through the letters, numbers, and symbols. What had begun as a learning game became a competition as father and son tried constantly to outwit each other. Van enjoyed the challenge and the attention he received from his father during this pastime.

  Earl had no way of knowing that one day Van would employ their game to do the devil’s work and to gain attention on a much larger scale.

  4

  After the war was over, when he could take the embarrassment no more, Earl moved with Gertrude and Van to San Francisco, hoping that his wife would be happier there and would mend her ways. But San Francisco offered Gertrude a host of new men with whom to carry on her flirtations, and Earl, well aware that divorce was unacceptable in the Methodist religion, did the unthinkable. He asked his wife for a divorce.

  “I want you to file the papers, because I don’t want my son to grow up thinking I abandoned him. I’ll let him stay with you, though,” Earl said. “A boy needs his mother. You can send him to me during the summer months.”

  As unhappy as she was, Gertrude did not relish the idea of being a divorced woman. She liked having the best of both worlds—all the men she wanted and the security and respect that came with being a preacher’s wife.

  “I’ll be better. I promise,” she cried, as she had so many times before. “Please, Earl, think of the embarrassment,” she said, placing her arms around him.

  “I am thinking of the embarrassment,” Earl retorted, removing her arms. “I’ve tried to forgive. I’ve tried to forget. It keeps happening. God forgive me, but I cannot live like this.”

  When my grandfather refused to bend, my grandmother filed for divorce.

  Van begged his father to let him stay with him, but Earl insisted that it was best he live with his mother. “You’ll be fine,” he told his son.

  Van knew he would not be fine. So did Earl, and his heart was heavy as he boarded the train that would take him back to South Carolina, more than two thousand miles away from his nine-year-old son.

  Gertrude and Van moved to 514 Noe Street, located on a steep hill in the heart of the Castro District. Their home, a two-story, turn-of-the-century Victorian, was divided into two apartments—one upstairs and one downstairs. Gertrude and Van occupied the first floor. The house was one of the few that had not been destroyed during the 1906 earthquake. Noe Street, unlike many streets throughout San Francisco that were built on sand dunes, had a solid rock foundation, which spared all of the houses on the hill from destruction.

  Van’s room soon became his refuge and his prison. He filled it with his beloved books, and when he wasn’t in school, he hid there while his mother gave piano lessons to the neighborhood children. He could hear the sounds of the children laughing in the living room beside him and his mother laughing with them as they banged away on the keys of the piano.

  Gertrude did what she had to do for Van—she made sure he ate and went to school. Other than that, she ignored him. She embraced her newfound freedom, and soon a bevy of men were steadily making their way to her home.

  Van could hear, sometimes, the banging of the headboard, the moans and gasps permeating the walls. He let the sounds of his music—flutes and violins and clarinets—swirl around him as he turned up the volume of his phonograph to drown out the banging. As he listened to The Mikado, the tale of lust and deceit captured in the opera mimicked his own life, and he listened over and over, memorizing every word.

  Other times he occupied himself with writing codes, wi
shing his father were sitting across from him trying to decipher the meaning. Van missed his father. Even though he was strict, my grandfather had given him attention, had challenged him, had made him feel like he was important. In San Francisco, Van felt like he was nothing more than a nuisance, invisible.

  Nobody.

  Earl would spend the rest of his life regretting his decision to allow his only son to live with his ex-wife, but at the time, he had been convinced that a child was better off being raised by his mother.

  5

  On the day his divorce from Gertrude became final, Earl married Eleanor “Ellie” Bycraft Auble, a widow twelve years his junior. He had met Ellie two years earlier, when he was tasked with informing her that her husband, George Coleman Auble, had been killed in an explosion while loading depth charges on the USS Serpens on March 10, 1943. Ellie had appreciated the comfort the chaplain had given her, and when Earl returned from San Francisco, these two souls searching for comfort in an unfair world were drawn to each other immediately. Neither of them had deserved their fates, but together their wounds could heal. Earl fell in love with Ellie’s genteel manners and steadfastness. She was a woman who would be faithful, a woman who would be a role model for Van.

  After they married, the couple moved to Indianapolis so that my grandfather could teach military intelligence and business at the U.S. Army Finance School at Fort Benjamin Harrison. He had been excommunicated from the Methodist Church because of his divorce, but the preacher was soon welcomed into the Disciples of Christ ministry in Indianapolis.

  The following year, Earl flew Van from San Francisco to Chicago for summer break. When he got off the plane, Van ran into Earl’s arms, excited to see him after so long.

  “Van, this is Ellie, your new mother,” Earl said, prying Van’s arms from around his neck. “She’s my wife now, and you are to listen to her and give her the respect you give me.”

  Van turned slowly and looked at the pretty young woman standing next to his father. The smile that had lit up his face when he saw Earl disappeared into a trembling frown.

  Ellie reached out her hand.

  Van hesitated, then shook it when Earl urged him forward.

  “Hi, Van. It’s so nice to meet you. Your father has told me so much about you.”

  Van didn’t respond.

  “Are you ready for the beach?” she asked.

  Van nodded and turned to walk with them to the waiting car. Each year, all of the Bests gathered in the family-owned beach house at 302 Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for summer vacation. Van had looked forward to this trip for months, and now this woman had ruined everything. Van slumped into the backseat and stared out the window, occasionally stealing glances at the woman who held his father’s attention.

  “How do you like San Francisco?” Ellie inquired.

  “I don’t,” Van said.

  “Watch yourself, young man,” Earl warned.

  “Well, she asked. I don’t like it.”

  “Why not?” Ellie pressed.

  “Mother has too many boyfriends,” Van said, hoping the shock value of his words would make them leave him alone.

  It worked.

  Ellie gave up and spent the next fourteen hours on the road ignoring Van, who spoke to his father in Japanese so Ellie couldn’t understand him. When Earl insisted he speak in English, Van stopped talking.

  By the time they reached the beach house, the animosity my father felt for his new stepmother had reached a fever pitch. Grabbing his bag, he stomped up the stairs into the house, ignoring Louise, Aileen, and Bits when they said hello. He ran into his usual bedroom, slammed the door, threw himself on the bed, and cried. He was still crying when Earl walked in.

  “I had hoped you would have grown up some and learned how to behave yourself properly, but apparently your mother has not been disciplining you,” Earl said, pulling off his belt. “You will treat my wife with respect. Now bend over,” he added sternly.

  Aileen and Bits were listening and giggling down the hall. “He just got here. What do you think he did?” Bits said.

  “I don’t know, but it must have been bad. Uncle Earl sounds real mad,” Aileen replied.

  The next morning, Aileen was waiting for him in the hall. “How’s your backside?” she said, laughing. Van punched her in the arm. Hard.

  It didn’t take long for Van’s cousins to pick up where they had left off when he moved. At breakfast, the girls began making fun of him for reading a book at the table. When Aileen accidentally spilled milk on his book, Van exploded.

  “Don’t cry over spilt milk,” his cousins jeered.

  “You have no idea. This is a first edition,” Van cried, grabbing his book and running into the kitchen to tenderly dry each page.

  The girls spent the summer teasing him mercilessly. One afternoon, as Van sat alone on the handrail of the second-floor porch, reading, Ellie asked him to go to the car and fetch her sunglasses. Startled from his book, Van fell over the railing, landing on his head in front of the whole family. Ellie screamed when Van hit the sandy ground with a thud. For a moment, everyone thought he was dead. Embarrassed, my father lay there stunned for a moment, then got up, brushed the sand from his clothes, and disappeared into a far room in the back of the house to cry. He knew this was more ammunition for his cousins. He was different and could not fit in. And he didn’t care enough to try. He preferred rummaging through an old trunk he’d found in the attic, looking at the crinkled papers and yellowed christening gowns someone had tucked away years ago, rather than playing silly games. He didn’t want to run on the beach with them or swim in Withers Swash. He wanted to be left alone with his books, his escape from his family.

  His cousin Mildred had already escaped.

  She had disgraced the Best family the year before when she gave birth out of wedlock to a baby girl named Joyce. Mildred promptly ran off to Hollywood with an aspiring Cuban actor, leaving her child to be raised by her aunt Estelle. Joyce would be raised to believe that her aunts—Bits, Louise, and Aileen—were her sisters, and her great-aunt, Estelle, was her mother.

  As the summer wore on, Van began longing for San Francisco. His dark, lonely bedroom was more tolerable than this.

  Earl realized early on that it was fruitless to try to force Van and Ellie’s relationship. Van made no bones about his hatred for his stepmother, and he constantly tried to make Earl see that she was mean to him, hoping his father would send her away.

  On the way home from the beach, things finally came to a head. Ellie was talking with Earl, and Van interrupted, smiling because he knew it would make her mad.

  “Van, has anyone invited you to this conversation?” Ellie said.

  “I didn’t need an invitation to speak before you came along,” Van said smartly.

  Earl slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road. He grabbed Van, yanked him from the car, and spanked him in front of his cousins and everyone driving by. Humiliated, Van huddled in the corner of the backseat, ignoring his laughing cousins, staring daggers into the back of Ellie’s head. He dreaded the coming weeks he would have to spend with his stepmother and cousins, who Earl had decided should spend the remainder of their summer vacation in Indiana.

  Once back on the road, my grandfather stopped in every state along the way—North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana—and let each of the children drive a few feet, just so they could tell their friends they had driven in different states. Van wanted to refuse to participate, but one look at Earl’s face when his turn came convinced him otherwise. He drove slowly, sitting in the driver’s seat next to Ellie, his knuckles white on the wheel.

  From the backseat, Bits watched Van and almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  6

  After that first miserable summer with Ellie, Van was almost happy to see his mother when he returned to San Francisco. He ran into the bedroom that housed his most precious possessions, feeling lighthearted for the first time in months. Here he was safe f
rom the outside world, safe from the teasing of other children. His feelings of happiness were fleeting, however.

  Gertrude had met a new beau while Van was away. Within months, she married John Harlan Plummer, a man who had little tolerance for Van and who was jealous of any attention Gertrude paid to her son. Van learned quickly to stay out of Harlan’s way. The only times Van saw his mother were at the dinner table and when he played the piano. Sometimes when she heard him playing, she would come into the living room, sit beside him, and give him pointers. It was during these times that Van felt a bond with her, but then Harlan would call her name and she would disappear. Left alone again, Van pounded his heartache into the piano keys.

  Then he met William Vsevolod Lohmus von Bellingshausen and everything changed.

  Fear had raced through Van’s body when he first walked through the double doors of Lowell High School. He observed the pretty girls laughing and joking with boys who seemed unconcerned with the enormity of high school, knowing it wouldn’t be long before they uncovered his secrets, their whispers reverberating down hallways between classes. His mother’s a whore. Did you see those glasses he wears? What’s wrong with him, anyway? He thinks he’s so smart.

  “Guten Tag,” Van said in German when a boy sat next to him in the cafeteria on the first day of school—his way of saying hello and establishing superiority with anyone he met.

  “Guten Tag,” the boy unexpectedly responded. “Wie heißt du?”

  “My name’s Van. You speak German?” Van said, stunned that this ordinary-looking kid had caught him at his game.

  “My name is Vsevolod von Bellingshausen, and I am German. And Chinese. Half and half. But in the States, I go by William Lohmus. Just makes it easier,” the boy informed Van, smiling at the look on his face.

  William and my father became fast friends, and they soon began scheduling their classes together. In ROTC, they befriended Bill Bixby, who would later rise to fame for his work in the television series The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and The Incredible Hulk. The three boys went through drills three times each week, and on Mondays and Fridays they studied military history, tactics, and theory. During summer maneuvers, they were Company C and took on the role of the enemy, hiding under brush until the single guard passed by and then swooping in like lightning to claim the flag and victory. Van occasionally called Earl to discuss what he was learning, confident that his gaining military knowledge would impress his father.