Jungleland (24 page)

What the two talked about at the party in Manhattan is lost to time, as is much of their short life together. Family members remember, though, that Morde fell for Gustafson almost immediately—something that hadn’t happened to him before. He had spent his life running away to far-flung parts of the world, and it seemed as though he’d forgotten about love or that love had forgotten about him. But she drew him in, and he kept looking at her. He liked the fact that every man in the room was gawking at her slender figure and her lipsticked smile. “I’m visiting some friends in the Hamptons over the weekend,” he had said, according to family. “Do you want to come?”

Maybe she laughed and turned a little red in the face, maybe she looked down at her feet or off across the crowded room of revelers. Maybe she just broke the news: she couldn’t come, she was about to marry another man.

But that didn’t stop Morde. He was ardent. He pleaded with her to give him a chance.

“You don’t get it, do you?” she likely said. “I’m getting married.”

Morde favored bespoke suits and ties knotted tight to his neck, and he seemed to know everyone who mattered. That’s what Gustafson would remember, according to family. Over the years, when he returned to Manhattan, he had become recognizable among New York’s society circles. He was a regular on sailing trips with the Vanderbilts. Some would say it had been his job as a spy to mingle in society circles and he just kept it up after the war. It was a natural fit for a hero who knew how to tell a good story. Maybe that’s why Gustafson ultimately changed her mind: she sensed that the man standing in front of her was different from all the others who had tried to seduce her over the years. “I’ll go,” she said. What the hell.

Three weeks later, on August 11, they were married—but not before Morde warned Gustafson about his wanderlust. “Look,” he might have said, “I have an unusual lifestyle. I travel—a lot.”

Gustafson surely grinned. She had done her fair share of traveling as a model. “Okay with me! What are we waiting for?”

They traveled to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, where Morde introduced her to some of his old life. They spent some time in Washington, D.C., and made at least two boat trips from New York to the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria. At one point, they lived on a seventy-foot double-masted wooden sailboat, moored along the Nile River. Morde did some freelance writing, a mixture of hard foreign reporting and softer travelogues.

Then he became a father. Christine was born in the spring of 1951 and Teddy two years later. Gustafson stopped modeling and gave herself over to motherhood. They returned to the United States and lived for a time in Alexandria, Virginia, in a house with a view of the Potomac River, and then settled down in a one-story brick waterfront house in Stamford, Connecticut. Morde’s downfall came soon after.

ONCE THE FAMILY
moved to Connecticut, Morde stopped traveling so much. It reminded me of when my family picked up everything and moved from Manhattan to sleepy Brooklyn. It was jarring. Amy and I were scared. We painted the walls, bought new furniture, put up pictures—a way of settling in, trying to make the place our own. The first few months we walked around the five rooms, marveling at how much more space we had. We sat in the living room at night with the windows wide open and couldn’t believe the quiet. When we had been living in the East Village, the streets had been so loud all night we’d had to shut the windows to sleep. The quiet was our new world.

In 1952, likely feeling the pressures to provide for his new family, Morde did the unthinkable. At forty-one years old, for the first time in his life, he accepted a true nine-to-five office job—as the head of the recently launched television division at the Associated Press. For most people, such a job would have been the start of the prime of life, when the future crystallizes and prosperity is suddenly within reach. Not so for Morde. “The last few years of his life were a downward spiral,” his grandson Joseph Essaye III told me. Gustafson wouldn’t talk to me about Morde, but Essaye spoke to his grandmother for me. “He went from journalist and explorer and spy to a father. That was very hard on him,” Essaye recalled. I said I understood. Adulthood seems a great compromise.

For Gustafson and Morde, the honeymoon was over. The couple argued, and it didn’t help that she didn’t get along very well with his mother, according to his extended family. There were days when husband and wife hardly spoke. Their marriage was crumbling.

The disappointments compounded the troubles. When he lost out on a top news job at CBS in New York, Dave Morde told me, he blamed it on his documentary
Sands of Sorrow
, which had received some negative press for its controversial embrace of the Palestinians. He grew taciturn with friends and loved ones, as though his mind was somewhere else, and he spent much of his free time alone.

Some days, when he wasn’t working at the Associated Press, he walked down to Seaview Harbor, rigged up his sailboat, and steered it into Long Island Sound. It was a gorgeous boat about fifty feet long, black as onyx, with two towering masts. Once out, there was nothing like the open water. That was freedom—the feeling that you could point the boat toward the distant horizon and keep going, as he had done when he’d stowed away on that steamship when he was a teenager. On the water, away from his screaming kids, the salty wind blowing against his cleanly shaved face, Morde had time to think. What had happened to his life? Where had he made a wrong turn? Could he really be one of those people who settle down?

ALL ALONG HE
continued to dwell on the Lost City of the Monkey God. More than a decade had passed since his expedition to Honduras, and it was getting increasingly hard to summon up the more intimate memories. According to some family members, he grew concerned that people doubted his discovery. If he had found something as amazing as he’d described, why hadn’t he returned? What was he hiding?

But Morde, as the years passed, simply couldn’t return. He was a different person, with a family and a job he couldn’t leave behind to spend months in the jungle. He had bills to pay, a household to keep afloat. He was trying to stay focused, according to family, to keep his life on track, to be a good husband and a good father to his children, a common struggle. But it was not a struggle that came naturally to Morde—or one that would find a happy resolution.

It was sometime around 1953 that he finally confronted Gustafson about all of it. “I can’t do this right now,” he told her, according to family. “I have to go.” There was talk of separation. He was drinking heavily again, a habit that was anathema to his Christian Scientist mother. Whatever mystery he owned about his life, both lived and unlived, whatever regrets or secrets he kept, curdled deeper inside of him.

Eventually he moved out and stayed at his parents’ summerhouse in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. His mother and father had recently moved to Florida, selling his childhood home in New Bedford. But he was in Dartmouth only briefly before he departed again, a decision that seemed to baffle his father, who couldn’t keep track of his son.

In December 1953, Albert Morde wrote to the Explorers Club: “It is uncertain at this writing as to what [Theodore’s] next address will be. . . . You had better [write] him at my address here, and I will take care of the forwarding of your notices and letters, same as I did over a period of years past. Then if and when he again gets an address to which you should send mail, I will let you know.”

AMID THE DARKNESS
, Morde’s mind regularly drifted back to the war years, stirring up demons that he’d rather forget. “He believed that someone from his days in the OSS was pursuing him,” his niece Susan Shumway told me. “He became very paranoid about that.” At another time, she added, “I think he may have been questioning everything. . . . What was really important? For example, the deaths of people he knew, possibly deaths he felt responsible for. War can do that.”

Joan Cenedella, another niece, said it was impossible to know much of anything about him during these final years. He was closed up. “It was difficult to ever know what he was going to do,” she said. “He was sophisticated and handsome, but he was a mystery.”

Shumway agreed. “That is very much how I remember Ted. Handsome, debonair, distant.”

By the summer of 1954, it seemed clear that Morde’s marriage to Gustafson was over for good. No one remembers the exact date. But Morde returned to Stamford, packed his family into his black Oldsmobile sedan, and drove them to Gustafson’s family’s house in Rhode Island. It was there that he said good-bye. At the time his children were one and three years old. Later, Morde’s family would say that there was no indication that that good-bye was meant to be forever. He said it as though he would see everyone again soon; he just needed some time to think and figure things out.

But on June 26, he was back in Dartmouth at his parents’ house, where his brother, Elton, found him at 3:30 p.m., suspended in the shower stall, naked except for his bathrobe, a thick rope looped around his neck. There was no saving him. Theodore Ambrose Morde was forty-three years old.

HIS DEATH CAME
as a complete shock. His family would never know what to make of it. He was not a deeply depressive person and had never spoken of suicide. “I want to believe it was a rival spy,” his nephew Dave Morde told me. “It just doesn’t make sense otherwise.” Others would suppose that the lost-city spirits had killed him. He had seen the city, they thought, and he would pay the price with his soul. “I know that my grandmother—Ted’s mother—once told me that the natives in Honduras believed the site he found was cursed and that he had violated this curse by going there,” Shumway said.

Two days after his death, the
New York Times
published an obituary, remembering the man who had “explored the ruins of ancient Indian civilization.” He was buried at the Rural Cemetery in New Bedford, the city where he had been born and where he had watched the whaling ships go off to sea.

On June 29, the secretary of the Explorers Club mailed a letter of condolence to the Morde family, describing their son and brother as a “true explorer. Both you and the Club have every reason to be proud of Theodore.” Albert Morde must not have seen the letter. Three days later, he composed a short note to the club—it was four sentences—notifying them of his son’s death. He asked that a note of it go into its records, and, as if he wanted to put those days to rest, he requested that they “kindly stop all mail for him from now on.”

In the intervening decades, Gustafson would remarry and, according to family, try to forget some of those times she had spent with Theodore Morde. For her, I was told that it was impossible to reconcile the adventurous, loving man she had met that summer day in Manhattan in 1948 with the man who had abandoned her almost six years later. According to her grandson, Joseph Essaye, she never forgave his decision to leave her and their young children. Today Gustafson lives on the east coast of Florida, but she doesn’t talk much about any of it, according to family.

As for the lost city, the legend became a casualty of time. Morde’s notebooks detailing his Honduran expedition gathered dust, were misplaced, and, for a while, went missing. Perhaps they got lost when the Museum of the American Indian was sold to the Smithsonian or when George Heye died in 1957. One journal was said to have burned in a fire. The walking stick disappeared for some time too, which was a fitting end for a man who seemed determined to protect his sacred discovery.

After Morde was gone, the only living person with knowledge of what he had found and where he found it was his old expedition partner Laurence Brown. Whether the two friends saw each other again after the war or if Brown was present at Morde’s funeral, no one knows. Brown died in 1974 without adding anything more to the story of the lost city.

The Morde Theory

W
E WALKED FOR
hours in the blazing sun before we found the ruins. It was August 1, about a month from the day I had arrived in Honduras. Around us, the forest alternated with land that had been burned and cut, where copper-red shapes of mahogany stumps stood out of islands of second-growth grass and vines. The bandits had captured Chris close to this area, but we didn’t talk about that.

Steadily, we pushed forward. We had paid a man from Blue Sky to come along with us. He had a pistol pushed into his belt and a rifle on the mule that high-stepped through the brush. We saw the large mounds that the settlers had mentioned the night before. Some as high as ten feet and in groupings of twos and threes, they were larger than the mounds we’d spotted along the river. “They’re everywhere!” exclaimed Chris, a bit stunned. I couldn’t stop thinking about the entombed giants, and I had the feeling I was walking through a graveyard. Pancho, who had been quiet most of the way, started to complain of stomach pains and blamed it on the evil mountain spirits. “We must be getting close to the city,” he said.

Soon Chris paused in a stand of tall trees. “Look there,” he said, flicking his machete at the shaded ground. “It’s easy to miss.” He kicked away some vines, revealing disfigured cobblestones scattered about in what resembled a crude pathway. “It’s a road,” he said excitedly.

“A road?” I repeated, imagining asphalt with yellow broken lines.

“Yeah, a road. It’s probably a thousand years old or more.”

He said that roads had been built between neighboring cities and from city centers to the closest river, where people and goods were shipped into and out of the jungle. “You couldn’t move here without a road. Think of all that mud we walked through.”

Chris scrambled ahead until he stopped again at an open expanse where two large stone walls protruded from the grassy earth. Several feet tall, rounded off at the top, with decades of creepers and weeds engorging them, the walls extended for many yards, like giant serpents, before disappearing into the horizon. It reminded me of Morde’s notes: “We found . . . walls upon which the green of the jungle had worked small damages.”