Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost Read online

  “You’re taller than I thought you’d be,” he says, the slow indication of a smile creasing the corners of his mouth.

  “Mr…. Titler …?”

  “You’re thinner, too, than I imagined, but other than that you turned out just the way I thought you would.”

  He had read the boy’s letters after he left San Francisco. Bad health and carpal tunnel defeated his efforts to reply, but he had wanted to respond, as much as he wants to say something now. He still remembers when he saw his first airplane, painted orange and black, two hundred feet over his family’s house in his hometown of Altoona, Pennsylvania. How he strung model planes from his bedroom ceiling and saw every flying picture that came to town. Years later he tested for his pilot’s license in an open cockpit on a frigid December afternoon.

  Titler will tell the boy these stories soon enough, and the boy will tell him stories as well. They will sit in the kitchen eating slices of apple pie and catch up. The years of silence between them will fall away.

  For now, they contemplate each other a moment longer. Then Titler takes the boy who read his book and gave his knowledge a value he had never considered into a deep embrace; past and present merging into the now middle-aged man he holds against him, no longer a boy although he can’t help but think of him as that driven youngster, so different, really, dropping into his life the way he had through the mail, to impart one final observation.

  “You made something of yourself, son. You made something of yourself.”

  November 2, 2005

  Dear Malcolm,

  I wish you luck on your New Orleans article. Oh boy, how well do I know the rush of emotions at finishing a long project; publishing hell? Yes!—just one emotional peak and crash after another. Relax; you can’t miss. Keep scribbling! Best wishes, Dale

  Titler and I spoke by phone and corresponded through email after I returned to Kansas City. He said he was still at work on the Glenn Miller book he had first mentioned to me in 1994. He asked if I knew of any publishing houses that might be interested. Some editors I knew had the kind of connections he sought. They suggested some outlets, and I passed them along to him. After so many years of asking for his guidance, I felt honored to help.

  October 14, 2006

  Hello Malcolm,

  I don’t know where this email will find you; possibly you may still be in Afghanistan or on assignment elsewhere in the world. But I thought it was time I got back to you, as I have been much remiss in my correspondence. I have, in fact, somehow misplaced your latest email to me.

  I regret to say I have not followed through with your kind pointer on the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency and your effort on my behalf. It was most kind of you to go to bat for me. Despite the promise it holds, I have all but lost total interest in pursuing the Glenn Miller issue. I’m eighty now, and after more than thirty years of striving with the mystery [of Miller’s death], I’m ready to throw in the towel and enjoy my declining years. Struggling with publishers and editors no longer holds my interest as it once did. I have come to grips with the realization that the writers do not produce those readable, salable and entertaining works that make it to market; the publishers do that—and they are in complete control. And publishers, being human, make a lot of mistakes.

  More than a year after Katrina, the Coast is still pretty much of a mess. Recovery and rebuilding is agonizingly slow.

  Again, I apologize for my tardy response. Email me and let me know where you are and what you’re doing. I think of you often and wish you well; we’d welcome another visit should your assignments bring you into the area again. Warmest regards, Dale

  * * *

  I did not hear from him again. I stopped writing to him too. Work and freelance travel assignments I used vacation days to pursue overseas consumed all my time. New York literary agents read my stories and several asked if I was working on a book. I thought of little besides taking advantage of their interest and further establishing my career.

  In 2008, I completed a book on Afghanistan, an endeavor that punctured my ego when more than thirty publishers rejected it before Beacon Press picked it up. My mother, then ninety-two years old, was ecstatic. “You see, you see!” she told me over the phone. “I knew you could do it. Listen to your mother!”

  My triumph was short-lived. The Star laid me off in March 2009, a casualty of the Great Recession. My father died that May, and I returned home to Winnetka to care for my mother. The one bright spot: My Afghanistan book, The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul, came out in September. I sent a copy to Titler, writing to him from the same desk on which I had drafted my first letter to him, but he didn’t answer.

  Despite my experience, my years as a reporter meant little in Chicago’s tight job market, and I found no work. In one instance, my résumé was one among more than two hundred submitted for a position in the Chicago Tribune’s Schaumburg bureau, a suburb northwest of the city. Desperate, I took temp jobs much as I had decades earlier. In 2013, I found full-time work with the maintenance crew of a golf course at Park Ridge Country Club, near my mother’s house. I was fifty-six and cutting golf tees for minimum wage. Overcome, depressed, I stopped applying for reporting jobs and quit writing. I went to bed with no expectations of the next day. In the morning, I woke up in an exhausted stupor. My journalism career was a thing of the past.

  To make matters worse, my mother had changed dramatically in the short time I’d been home. Perhaps it was the shock of my father’s death after sixty-two years of marriage. Perhaps I had been so preoccupied with my own problems that I’d failed to notice her decline. She no longer remembered Titler and many other people. She had arthritis and curvature of the spine, and she had lost sight in one eye. She was almost deaf. She was not so unaware, however, that she did not recognize her mental and physical diminishment. She hated her neediness. She railed against the caregivers I hired to help her—except for one, Cathy, who had grown up in rural Ireland and spoke with a brogue. She had a helmet of curly straw-colored hair and wore large round glasses that slid down her nose. She brought my mother sweet rolls and magazines. What is more important, she made her laugh.

  “Malcolm says he’s going out to pick up girls,” Cathy shouted into my mother’s ear when I’d leave for work. “He says we’re not good enough for him.”

  Even Cathy, however, could not prevent my mother’s mood swings. At times, she exhibited the anger and fitfulness of a two-year-old, and I was often the object of her ire. I did not have a Titler-like third-party source of wisdom to help me through elder care.

  My first day at Park Ridge, I picked up sticks blown onto the fairways by a storm. A young man from Mexico, Santos, worked with me. He asked me my name, and I told him. Malkin, he said. He tried several times to pronounce “Malcolm” but never got it right. He apologized. Don’t worry, I told him, but he wasn’t satisfied. He was studying English at a community college twice a week and wanted to get it right. When he got tired of trying, he asked me if I knew Belmont Avenue in Chicago. Yes, I told him. Santos lived on Belmont. Since we both knew the street and he could pronounce it, he asked if he could call me Belmont.

  “That would be fine,” I said.

  I wondered if he was mocking me. Maybe he meant nothing by it. He seemed nice enough. I didn’t know, other than that I’d lost my job and now I’d lost my name.

  One June afternoon, my third month at Park Ridge, I was assigned to clear weeds from a brick walk. I used a knife to pry the weeds loose and dropped them in a bucket. I alternated between bending over, kneeling, and squatting. My back ached no matter the position. A club member in a blue polo shirt with a purple alligator on the breast pocket and Bermuda shorts watched me work. He held a drink and a cigar.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked finally.

  “Just started,” I said.

  “Why? Do you see this as an opportunity?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  I didn’t answer. He
walked away. He had no idea. He didn’t know me, my previous life. But there was no reason he should. I kept pulling weeds.

  Each evening, I drove home from Park Ridge, kissed my mother on the forehead, and asked about her day.

  “Fine,” she’d say. “Did you write today? Have you had dinner?”

  “I’ll make myself something in a minute.” She didn’t know I worked at a country club. She assumed I was still a reporter.

  “You eat poorly,” she admonished.

  I went into the kitchen leaving my mother in the living room with a caregiver. After I ate, I read in my bedroom. I listened to the caregiver shout to penetrate my mother’s deafness before I nodded off. Sometimes I’d awaken and hear my mother on her exercise bicycle, ninety-six years old, unable to sleep and refusing to give in to her infirmities.

  The pedals creaked in strained rhythm. When she got tired, my mother spoke to my father. Can you see me, Chuck? she’d say. Are you watching? Help me for another five minutes, Chuck.

  Her loneliness touched my own. I lay in bed wondering what I was going to do until three a.m., when my alarm roused me. Yawning and stretching, I got up, showered, made coffee, and smeared two slices of toast with peanut butter for breakfast. I checked email and Facebook hoping I’d have a message from a newspaper editor. Nothing. I read the Tribune and the New York Times online, then drove twenty minutes to Park Ridge and clocked in at five-thirty.

  Every morning, I started my shift driving a golf cart across a path of pink pebbles and onto the rough to clean water sprinklers. The thick tires pressed into the dew-wet grass and left wide tracks, the whines of the strained engine violating the dawn. I stopped behind the swaying, low-fingered branches of a willow. The dying complaint of the cart’s engine drifted into the milky morning light spreading across the sky, and a flat quiet unfolded around me. Warm dense breezes swept veils of mist rising from the night-cooled ground. Red-winged blackbirds rolled and dropped almost to the ground before rising again to chase a red-tailed hawk. The raven outline of a coyote trotted across a sand bunker and stared in my direction. Headlights from tractor mowers cutting fairways penetrated the dark like underwater creatures, and Santos and my other coworkers driving them shouted, “Yee-hah!” to one another like drovers. I cherished this time of the morning. I emerged from within its fading shadows feeling as if I were newly born and looking forward rather than backward. But at fifty-six, I knew I was not.

  My second year at Park Ridge, while I was planting shrubs near the country club’s entrance, I received an email from Titler’s daughter, Cathy.

  August 16, 2014

  Dear Malcolm,

  I came across your name on the internet. I must admit that I never kept track of Dad’s contacts during his writing career, however I do recall hearing your name favorably in the past. I wanted to write and let you know that Dad’s health has rapidly been declining since April. He fell and broke a rib on April 18th. Since then, it’s been one setback after another. When I visited him today, I asked if he remembered you and he broke into a huge smile and said that he sure did. I told him I was going to email you and tell you he was under the weather. He told me to tell you hello. Sincerely, Cathy Titler

  I told Cathy I’d drive down to visit her father but he died on August 20, before I could get time off. I scolded myself for not having visited him since Katrina, for allowing my work and ambition to get in the way of the small things that become big things when you can no longer do them. And given where I was working, I questioned the value of my accomplishments.

  That evening, I looked through the folder of my correspondence with Titler. I reread the Tribune article about the Red Baron’s granddaughter and thumbed through copies of my carefully handwritten letters and his patient replies. I recalled sitting at my desk by the window overlooking a terrace. Squirrels scampered across the roof. The shade thrown by the large branches of an oak patterned my desk. Watching those patterns shift and sway with the wind, I recalled writing my first letter to him. Dear Mr. Titler. I had no idea then that his reply would be the start of a correspondence that would last decades and influence the course of my life. Spurred by Titler, I had learned the basic skills necessary for my working life. I chose not to think of him as gone. He was just not with me as I’d like him to be, but he was still there in the many letters I’d saved.

  Five years after I returned home, my ninety-eight-year-old mother’s diminished health took its cruelest toll when her legs became too weak for her to walk. With great effort, she would push herself up off the living room couch where she spent her days. She leaned forward, her legs shaking until the shuddering became too much and she collapsed back on the couch. She began using a walker and then a wheelchair.

  “Dammit!” she’d shout in frustration.

  On Thanksgiving morning 2015, my mother made yet another futile attempt to walk.

  “Don’t try to get up again,” I said. “I’ll get the wheelchair.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” she snapped.

  She stared straight ahead through the patio glass doors, infuriated. Her eyes burned with the anger of total defeat, an anger that knew there was no place to turn, no doctor, no anything that would support her desperate efforts to walk.

  Fuck it.

  She would never have said that—often reprimanded me for my liberal use of four-letter words—but that was what her look said to me. Fuck it. If I have to live like this, I won’t.

  She did not talk the rest of the day. Her expression changed from exasperation to an impenetrable calm that stayed with her into the following morning. A nurse came by and listened to her heart, checked her blood pressure. Everything fine.

  The next morning, November 28, my mother woke up feeling exhausted. Cathy helped her out of bed. She’d never seen my mother so weak, she told me. My mother didn’t shower. She consented to her wheelchair without complaint. She ate a full breakfast, however, alleviating my concern: two scrambled eggs, a pork sausage, sliced tomato and two pieces of wheat toast. She read the Chicago Tribune. I drove to the supermarket and picked up some seedless grapes, her favorite. She said nothing when I offered them to her. Cathy suggested that she nap. She helped my mother into the wheelchair and pushed her down the front hall to her room.

  My mother got into bed, lay on her side, and fell asleep within seconds. Cathy put a blanket over her and tucked it in. She took off my mother’s shoes. She watched her breathing for some time, growing more and more concerned. She called for me. I heard the urgency in her voice and hurried down the hall. I listened to my mother take two shallow breaths and then one deep breath. Two shallow, one deep. Two shallow, one deep. Soon the deep breath became shorter and less pronounced. My thoughts flashed to Kabul. In 2012, I found a cat that had been hit by a car. I took it to my hotel room. It breathed the same way before it died.

  “Oh, Letty,” Cathy said, her voice breaking. “Oh, Letty, don’t go.”

  I stared at my mother. Her eyes closed, mouth open a crack. Her chest no longer rising and falling. I touched her forehead and brushed away hair fallen across her face. I wiped a drop of saliva from a corner of her mouth. For no good reason, I’d always assumed we’d have a moment together before she died. That I would sit beside her, holding her hand perhaps, listening to her final words before she drifted off. Instead, she had released me without notice. In that moment, I could not remember my frustration with her, could not recall how her neediness at times annoyed me to distraction. I felt unmoored, too stunned for tears. I called to her.

  “Mom!”

  As if I could summon her back.

  “Mom!”

  After my mother died, I returned to Kansas City in the hope that my work with the Star would land me a journalism job, but I had been gone a long time. My connections had pretty much dried up. Again, I supported myself through temp jobs.

  Then Bill Bell, a former Philadelphia Inquirer colleague teaching journalism at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, asked me to speak to his class.
I turned him down. Who was I to talk to aspiring reporters? I thought. He asked me to reconsider.

  I recalled when Titler had written, Not to throw a damper on your efforts, but I have given up writing. I understood how discouraged he must have felt. The sense of total defeat that leaves you slumped in a chair, unable to move, the very notion of getting up an insuperable task. Yet despite what he said, he had gotten up. He didn’t stop writing until much later. Even toward the end of his life, his family told me, he had continued jotting down ideas, continued revising his Glenn Miller manuscript. He persevered.

  I think you have the spark and drive to accomplish what you want in the world, Malcolm, he had written in 1980. Don’t try to get it all at once, however. Remember that living is the reason for life. The important thing is to keep going.

  I spoke to Bill’s students. I told them about my mother and how she had made my brothers and me read and write, and how she had pushed us to ask questions. I brought up Titler and explained how his book had laid the foundation for me becoming a reporter and traveling abroad. Rather than focusing on the famous, I explained that my work in social services had inspired me to examine often ignored lives. The people I wrote about weren’t well known like Richthofen. They didn’t fit a news cycle. They lived day to day with few options to choose from other than bad and less bad, but to a person they never buckled under.

  “Neither would I,” I said.

  The next morning, I woke up determined to write. Write something. I didn’t know what. Just write. Interview someone at a bus shelter, a coffee shop, anybody. I had to rekindle the hunger and motivation that had been lost to me for too long.

  I showered, dressed, and drank a cup of coffee. I grabbed a notepad and my jacket. Then my phone buzzed. A Facebook message: