The sun dipped behind the Golden Gate Bridge, and the white lights of San Francisco twinkled to life. The guests stuffed themselves with crab and prime rib. When I cut the cake, after the drum roll from the band, I announced, “We’ve got the booze, the food, the cake, the band, and the presents. But where’s the bride and groom?”
The room rang with laughter.
On the way home that night, at my godson’s request I opened the moonroof of the limousine. It was his first ride in such a luxurious vehicle. He grinned from ear to ear, stood up, and waved his arms into the warm air. Inside, I snuggled onto the chest of my admiral.
ELEVEN
The Admiral’s Family
Two months later, I accompanied John on an August business trip to the East Coast. I didn’t mind sharing business with pleasure when it came to travel; I had done it since I’d met John five years earlier. For this trip, when John hinted at seeing some of his family’s history, my heart skipped a beat. Today our first stop was the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, to visit the grave of John’s father. The academy was a key ingredient to John’s family history. His father had gone to school there, graduating with the Class of 1923; taught there in 1946 and 1947; and been buried there in 1955.
We sat in the visitors’ parking lot, with the engine running, as John scratched through his briefcase. “I know my security pass is in here somewhere,” John said. “I wouldn’t have left it in the hotel room. It’s too valuable.”
John’s security pass was always a mystery to me. It was the magic wand he waved that opened gates to military bases and government facilities, both here and abroad. I witnessed its power many times. The enigma of the hardbound black leather identification wallet was that it contained a photograph that was not John Francis Perry, nor was the name typed under it—Robert Lee Stuart. I queried John the first time I noticed the discrepancy. He immediately shut me down and ranted about it being a high-level security issue. I let it drop, but still wondered.
“A-ha! Here it is. It was hiding behind your photograph.”
“That tattered photo from the Mexico trip?” I laughed. “I should get you a new one.”
“Not on your life. I like this one.” He leaned over and kissed me.
The overcast sky suited a visit to a cemetery. The wipers cleared the light mist on the windshield; I put the rental car in gear and maneuvered from the parking lot to Gate One. John flashed his magic ID card; the guard immediately saluted, then gave me a day pass. I drove onto the academy grounds.
“Turn left at the next intersection,” John instructed. “The cemetery’s that way, toward the water.”
“Of course,” I said. “We saw the cemetery last weekend, from the river.”
I have always had a good sense of direction, a trait that has served me well on more than one occasion. Two days earlier, we’d sailed down the Severn River with our friends in their forty-eight-foot sloop. We slowed near the academy, and John pointed out its significant buildings and the cemetery, on the small peninsula that overlooked the river.
As I drove into the cemetery we had to make an immediate choice, Cushing Road to the right or McCandless Road to the left. “Turn right,” John directed, but as we slowly moved along he seemed disoriented. “It’s been a long time since I was here,” he mumbled apologetically. “The trees have grown, things look different. I remember my dad’s buried on a small knoll, near a tree.”
“It looks like there’s more than one knoll, and more than one tree,” I said as I scanned the grounds.
“I thought I’d remember,” John said. His lower lip began to tremble.
We circled the cemetery, and when Cushing intersected McCandless we took a left and ended up back where we started. “Let’s go down Sigsbee Road,” John suggested. “I saw it to the left, up ahead. It may help me remember.”
It was the only other road in the cemetery, and it was short. We made another circle and ended up back at the entrance. I was beginning to wonder if there really was a grave. But why would John lie about his father’s final resting place? Was this going to be another episode in the missing-family saga we had lived with for the last five years? What was the truth?
The truth was that John’s relatives were still phantoms. It had almost ruined our summer business/vacation trip to the Miami area the year before. I had been stubborn and relentless. “We will be right in your family’s neighborhood,” I said. “And they’ll see that I’m not a gold digger.” I was still intent on proving it, even after five years.
In Key West we checked into a white-shuttered, historic bed-and-breakfast, with no telephone in the room. After lunch, John called his grandmother from a pay phone at the wharf, to set up a time to meet them in Coconut Grove. He looked debonair and relaxed, leaning against the booth, in his white shorts and shirt, straw hat and sunglasses. Suddenly he became visibly angry and tense, and slammed the receiver onto the hook. “No answer,” he mumbled. “I’ll have to try again.”
Later that evening, John went down to the foyer, to a closet under the stairs designated as the phone booth. He told me to stay in our room, and I acquiesced for a moment, but I wanted to hear his conversation. So shortly after he left, I crept down the stairs and sidled up to the phone closet. Its door was ajar, but not a word was being spoken. John was just sitting silently with the receiver to his ear. I felt a cough come on and managed to stifle it to some extent, but the noise tipped him off that I was near, and he immediately started speaking Spanish in a louder and louder voice. Then he slammed the receiver down and emerged. His ruddy complexion had changed to deep red, and the veins in his neck bulged. “I told you to stay in the room,” he growled.
“What’s the matter?” I said, ignoring his condemnation.
“The maid says the family took my grandmother to the Ocean Reef Club, near Key Largo. They don’t want her to talk to me.”
“We have to go back through Key Largo. Let’s stop in and pay them a surprise visit.” I was always looking for a way to put faces to the names of John’s family.
“You don’t understand. Ocean Reef Club is private and exclusive. We can’t just drive in. You have to have your name on a list to get past the guard, and ours won’t be on it. It’s the kind of place frequented by presidents and movie stars.”
“And elusive grandmothers with lots of money.” I was stubborn and on a mission. Later, when we drove north through Key Largo, I insisted that John show me the entrance to the Ocean Reef Club. At least
it
was real. But no matter how much I whined and pleaded, he would not allow me to drive up to the guarded entrance. We were so close, I couldn’t understand his hesitation. Maybe he didn’t want to confront his grandmother. To me, John’s family was a mirage that disappeared whenever we got too near.
Now it was going to happen again. The dead father’s grave would somehow turn up missing. What excuse would John give? Where could the dead go? Just as I was beginning to doubt him, John came through for me and quieted that nagging voice inside.
“I think I see it,” he whispered. “Park here.”
He was out of the car as soon as I turned the engine off. I reached into the backseat, grabbed the two carnation bouquets we had picked up earlier, and followed him as he started up the small rise. He stopped, stood erect in front of a large granite headstone, and saluted. When I finally caught up with him, he was quietly crying. I said nothing as I read the inscription:
JOHN RICHARD PERRY
REAR ADMIRAL CIVIL ENGINEER CORPS
UNITED STATES NAVY
1899-1955
What John said was true. His father was buried in the U.S. Naval Academy cemetery. I handed John the flowers. He bent over and gently placed one bouquet of the pink, red, and white carnations to the right of the tombstone. As he straightened up, he winced in pain and grabbed the headstone for support. He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand and said, “I always tried to be a good son, but I could never be the man my father wanted me to be. He was strict, with his military background and all.”
“I’m sure he loved you very much.”
“Maybe. It was hard for him to show it, and my brothers and I needed him to show it. Mom died when I was seven, when Dad was at the Naval Training Station in Great Lakes, Illinois. My dad didn’t know how to take care of five sons, and he took out his sadness on us. It wasn’t our fault that Mom died so young.”
“I’m sure it just looked that way. You were sad, too.”
“I guess,” he sniffed, fighting back the next onslaught of tears. He moved to the other side of the stone and placed the second bouquet of carnations against the base. He struggled up with a deep sigh, came over, and put his arm around me.
“My time with you has been the happiest of my life,” he said. “I never lived in one place so long. I never had a family as loving as yours, or the friendship of so many wonderful people.”
We both stood there for a few moments, in silence, looking at his dad’s grave. I let him be. “I couldn’t attend the funeral. I was the black sheep of the family. I was the only son left, and I couldn’t even see my dad off.”
“Surely you must have misunderstood.”
“No. My stepmother sent word that I was not to show up. I don’t know what I did to deserve that kind of treatment.”
“Seems like they’re still doing it,” I said, shaking my head.
John had told me many stories about his family. He provided detailed stories every now and then, and updated me on their latest exploits.
John’s family continued to remain resistant and missing. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand seeing John cry when his birthday slipped by unacknowledged, or Father’s Day was ignored. I couldn’t stand his pain when he saw a FOR SALE sign on his Coconut Grove home the previous year.
The Christmas before, I wrote his children a letter explaining what John had been through over the last four years... emotionally, physically, and financially. All the letters came back to me, marked with NO SUCH PERSON AT THIS ADDRESS. I wasn’t surprised. Not any more.
“Come on,” John said, “Enough of this maudlin stuff. I want to show you more of the academy, where my dad lived, and where John Paul Jones is buried.”
I recorded my visit in photographs, including several of John at his father’s grave. I had finally met someone in John’s immediate family, even if he was dead.
TWELVE
The Admiral’s Decorations
By the following July, John and I had been together for six years, and we both found it hard to believe that time had passed so quickly since our first date at the Drexels’, when I had consented to be the “fourth” for dinner. It was 1987, and the past six years were full of dreams come true for me. Fantasies continued to become realities. John’s admiral status took us on exotic trips and opened up naval facilities like the officers’ club on Treasure Island for my graduation party. Family and friends validated my relationship with John by participating in our lives for all types of social occasions. Even my father, who had been suspicious of John when they first met, never again said another disparaging remark. We still struggled with finances, but what married couple didn’t? The euphoria of fantasies becoming realities far outweighed my distress over the financial strains as I was caught up in John’s world and could not imagine it any other way.
When John’s fifty-ninth birthday approached, we decided to go to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. Normally we would have held one of our annual backyard Fourth of July birthday parties, where our friends and family would splash in the pool, chow down on barbecued steak, listen to my dad give a cornet concert, or laugh at the serenading gorilla wearing a pink tutu and carrying balloons and flags.
This year we weren’t in the big party mood. Our friend Ted Drexel had died from congestive heart failure two months before. It wouldn’t have been the same without his husky voice and perpetual grin. We wanted quiet. We also wanted to continue our relationship with his widow, Debbie, so we asked her to dinner at the Tonga Room in San Francisco. I even enticed her with the story of the first time I went there.
It was for my thirty-sixth birthday. We were seated next to the waterfall with our friends Pam and George when, midway through dinner, John jumped up from his chair and hurried through the door. We were puzzled, but I figured it was an emergency bathroom call. Fifteen minutes passed and John still wasn’t back. I was concerned and about to go after him when he reappeared and leaned over the table. In a conspiratorial whisper he told us he had just seen a fugitive Colombian drug dealer, so he had called the CIA.
“Watch,” he said. “Two couples are coming in. They’re agents. They’ll sweep the room, making it look like they’re trying to choose a table. But I think they’re too late.”
I thought it was quite exciting. Many years later, after John was no longer in my life, Pam and George would tell me that they thought it mighty strange. But their silence at the time validated that we were all having an intriguing time. What I didn’t recognize then was the ploy used by psychopaths—that of having stories of somehow being involved with the CIA or the FBI.
“So you’ve just got to come, Debbie. You need to get out.”
“I suppose, but only if you let me fix the cocktails and appetizers before we go.”
It was set. We sat in Debbie’s elegant living room, munching wontons and sipping rum and Cokes. “It’s almost like the night I came to dinner, when you and Ted introduced me to John. Except that the big kahuna isn’t here.”
Ted’s dark complexion had allowed him to pass for Hawaiian on many occasions. We raised our glasses. “To the big kahuna!”
Debbie noticed the Rolex on John’s wrist. She had impeccable taste in jewelry and a quick eye.
“Yes, twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth,” I said testily. “Lately, whenever I come back from a business trip, I find John has bought something new and expensive.”
“Barbara’s such a worrywart,” John said with a laugh, giving my knee a pat.