The Most Dangerous Animal of All (3 page)

Judy and I had agreed to attend church that morning, and later that afternoon we drove to Benicia, a tiny fishing village that had grown into a thriving city thirty-five miles northeast of San Francisco, to see the corporate headquarters of a company that had recently offered me a position.

My seventeen-year career as an electrical engineer had been an unsteady rise up the ladder of success. I graduated from Louisiana State University with a bachelor of science in 1985, and over the years I’d advanced with one company and then another, working my way into management before becoming vice president of industrial services for a large company. As often happens in the boom-and-bust industrial cycle in Louisiana, that company started showing signs of downsizing, and I began to worry about my job security.

A month before Judy called my mother, Delta Tech Service, in Benicia, had contacted me. The company was looking for someone to open an industrial service location in Baton Rouge. Fatigued by the ups and downs of the oil business, I turned the offer down and accepted a job as plant manager at a plastics manufacturer. I was supposed to start that job the Monday after Mother’s Day, but then Judy entered my life and everything changed. I accepted the position with Delta Tech, excited about the prospect of being able to travel in and out of San Francisco. It seemed like divine intervention that the job offer had come so close to the time I needed to be in California as often as possible. It was perfect. I could visit my mother whenever I was needed at our company headquarters.

Judy and I rode together in her sporty red Grand Am while Frank, wanting to give us some time alone, followed with Zach in a blue Mercury Sable. As we rode, I absorbed the landscape—the colorful Victorian houses climbing one after another up the hills, the unfamiliar shrubs and trees, the golden wild grass. It all seemed so surreal—a lifetime of emotions and experiences being crammed into a few short days. For a while we rode in silence, Judy wondering when I would start asking the tough questions and me trying to figure out what to ask first.

“Isn’t this where the bridge collapsed during the 1989 earthquake?” I said.

“Oh, yes. In fact,” Judy said, pointing overhead through the windshield to the bottom of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge, “right here where the red markers are is the exact spot the bridge failed.”

“I remember seeing that on TV like it was yesterday,” I said, before spitting out the question I had been dying to ask. We had been dancing around it since I arrived.

“So, Mom . . . who is my father?”

Putting both hands on the steering wheel, Judy cleared her throat and straightened in her seat. I could see she was nervous.

“You remember when we first talked on the phone, and you asked me to be completely honest with you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I promise you that I will always tell you the truth. We have to build our relationship on love, truth, and honesty. But, honey, it’s been so long now, and you have to realize that I was forced to forget everything about your father and about you. My memory of that time is severely repressed.”

Judy began sharing with me some of her recollections of my father, which were sketchy at best. “His name was Van. I don’t remember his full name,” she said, before explaining that they had met when she was very young and had run away together.

“Anyway, we ended up in New Orleans, and I ended up pregnant. One day, I think when you were about three months old, your father took you to Baton Rouge. I remember he took you by train, because we still didn’t own a car. He took you to a church. When he returned without you, I left him,” Judy continued. “Your father got mad at me for leaving and turned me in to the authorities.”

I struggled to comprehend what I was hearing.
I had been brought to a church?

“So my father took me to Baton Rouge and turned me in to the authorities at a church, and then he turned you in to the authorities?” I queried, wanting to be sure about every detail.

Judy hesitated and then nodded her answer. “Yes.”

I sat quietly for a moment, taking it all in. Finally I said, “You know what, Mom? I really don’t think I want to know any more about my father. I have a wonderful family back home in Baton Rouge, and my dad is the best father in the world.”

Judy’s relief was visible. She obviously didn’t want me to find him, either.

I wish that would have been the end of it for me, but over the next few months, the more I thought about my biological father, the more I wanted to meet him, to learn his side of the story, maybe even forgive him and begin a relationship. My mother’s memories were limited. Maybe his memories would be better, and he could give me a reason why he had brought me to Baton Rouge and left me there.

I decided I would try to find him after all. I wanted to learn the truth about him—what kind of man he was, why he didn’t want me. I know now that sometimes things should be left in the past, that knowing isn’t always better. Sometimes the truth is so horrible that it must be uncovered in bits and pieces, snippets here and there, absorbed slowly, as the whole of it at once is simply too shocking to bear.

And sometimes the truth changes everything . . .

1

October 1961

Earl Van Best Jr. sat on a bench in front of the bookstore across the street from Herbert’s Sherbet Shoppe. He was waiting while the owner of the store tallied up his earnings for the antique books he had brought back from Mexico City. While he sat there, he watched intently as a beautiful young girl came bouncing off the school bus that had just stopped on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Judah Street. As she walked, her blond hair shimmered, reflecting the afternoon sun. He stood up and stepped directly into her path, stopping her before she could cross the street.

“Hi,” Van said warmly, flashing the charming smile that made him a good salesperson.

“Hi,” she responded, smiling back before turning to walk toward the ice cream parlor.

He followed her.

“I’m Van. What’s your name?”

“Judy.”

Van opened the door for her, and they made their way across the beige mosaic-tiled floor to the glass-framed counter. Judy scanned the selections of sherbet before deciding on a plain vanilla ice cream cone. My father paid for her ice cream and asked if they could share a table. He looked like a nice fellow, very neat and polished, and Judy nodded her agreement, flattered by the attention from such a well-dressed, older man. They walked to a table in the corner, near the black-and-white-checkered wall.

Van sat down and gazed into the clear blue eyes that stared back at him so innocently. He loved beautiful girls, the younger the better, and this one was prettier than most.

Employing the British accent he liked to affect, he asked, “How old are you?” She looked like she was about twenty, but he was aware that she had just gotten off a school bus.

“Almost fourteen.”

Van didn’t believe her. She was much too mature, too pretty to be that young.

“Impossible,” he murmured.

“Yep,” she giggled, licking her ice cream, before adding, “My birthday is October eighth.”

He sat there for a moment, wondering if he should stay, but one look into her smiling eyes convinced him that her age did not matter. Although he was twenty-seven, it was, for my father, love at first sight, total and complete. He had to have her. She was young, innocent, malleable.

To Judy, Van seemed worldly and wise as he told her stories about trips to Mexico, about growing up in Japan. He talked about music and art and literature, things the adults in her life didn’t talk about.

“Where do you live?” Van asked.

“By the park,” Judy replied, “on Seventh Avenue.”

“With your parents?” Van pressed.

“My mom and stepdad, but I don’t like him. He’s mean,” Judy said.

“I have a mean stepfather, too,” Van said, adding softly, “I would never be mean to you.”

Judy giggled and stood up. “I’d better get home before I get in trouble.”

Van followed her out the door and watched her walk up the hill until she was out of sight before he headed back into the bookstore to collect the money owed him. Satisfied with the store owner’s estimation of the value of his books, he headed back to the Castro District, just around Mount Sutro, where he lived with his mother and stepfather.

The next afternoon, Van stood in front of the ice cream shop waiting for the school bus that hopefully would again deliver to him the loveliest girl he had ever seen. He watched as some pedestrians walked out of an Asian market and into a nearby Irish pub. Others stopped at the sidewalk cafés, enticed by the aroma of coffee streaming from their doorways. The Sunset District was always filled with pedestrians, mostly young college and high school students and older locals, businessmen who had helped develop the area, believing America’s promise of a better life for hardworking immigrant entrepreneurs.

My father wanted that entrepreneur lifestyle, and he was smart enough to have it. He had graduated from Lowell High School, a school that catered to gifted children, and attended City College of San Francisco, but his grades belied his intelligence. B’s and C’s lined his transcripts, except in English and ROTC, where he excelled. Those were the only subjects that really interested him. He had spent much of his life reading everything he could find, but he especially enjoyed literature—the kind that bores the presumably less intelligent.

He soon spotted the school bus coming up the street and watched as several children climbed down the steps. Then there she was again . . . beautiful and sweet.

He called out to her when she turned to walk up Judah Street. When she saw him, she smiled a big, happy smile.

“Hey, what are you doing?” she said.

“Waiting for you. Let me walk you home.”

“Oh, no. My mother would be mad if she saw me walking with a boy.”

“Well, then, we won’t let her see us,” Van grinned, taking Judy’s arm and steering her across the street. “We’ll cut through the park.”

Judy felt a quiver of excitement as they walked past her street and into Golden Gate Park. Her experiences with men throughout her life had not been good ones, but this man seemed different. Her mother, Verda, had divorced her father a few years before, because he was a strict disciplinarian and had treated his daughters cruelly. He had spanked Judy and her sister, Carolyn, often, leaving red welts on their backsides that made sitting down unbearable. Those spankings had finally ended with the divorce, but sometimes Judy missed her father.

Verda had moved with her girls to San Jose, where she had tried to pick up the pieces and make a new life, but things had not been much better there. Her first date resulted in rape, and Verda soon discovered she was pregnant with her rapist’s child—a boy she named Robert, who was born May 28, 1961. Verda knew she could not keep the child. He would be a constant reminder of what she had suffered, and she already had two mouths to feed. She put her son up for adoption immediately after his birth.

Rebounding from that experience, Verda moved back to San Francisco and married Vic Kilitzian, a marine electrician who worked at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. An Armenian from Greece, Vic did not speak English well. Judy could barely understand the words he spoke, except when he hurled insults at her mother. Although he did not hit the children, he made sure everyone knew that he thought Verda was stupid. In its own way, that was as bad as the spankings for Judy, who couldn’t bear to see her mother treated that way. For Verda, life had become worse than ever. She worked hard at Crocker Bank to help support the family and then returned home each afternoon for another round of belittling. Depressed and hopeless, she had little affection to give her daughters.

At thirteen, my mother was starving for love, and Van was eager to give the innocent girl the attention she sought. Judy smiled happily, feeling special and grown-up when Van tucked her arm into his. Her smile widened when he kissed her hand before leaving her at the edge of the park, six houses from her home.

She hoped he would be waiting when she got off the bus the next afternoon.

He was.

Van watched as Judy looked around for him. He saw that beautiful face light up when her eyes met his, and he moved toward her, taking her hand.

“Where are we going?” Judy said, not really caring. She had no fear. Van made her feel safe.

“It’s a surprise—one of my favorite places,” Van replied, steering her toward a nearby bus stop.

“We’re going to church?” Judy exclaimed when the bus let them off on California Street and Van pointed to Grace Cathedral.

“Have you ever been inside this church?”

Judy shook her head, staring at the majestic building, with its high towers and tall steeple that jutted up toward heaven.

Once inside, Van pointed out his favorite works of art hanging on the cathedral’s walls, including murals by Jan Henryk de Rosen, and impressed her with his knowledge of the history of various pieces.

Judy was fascinated—not just with the art but with the man who seemed to know so much about the church. No grown-up had ever talked to her like this, like she was an equal, like her opinion mattered. Van proudly showed her the cathedral’s organ, pointing out the long tubular pipes suspended on the walls. “I play the organ here sometimes,” he informed her.