What It Takes (36 page)

Gary knew what show was on, knew the whole schedule, matter of fact. In those days, there was only one station, WDAF, Channel Four, from Kansas City, thirty miles to the northeast. Nina and Carl got one of the first TVs in Ottawa. The mystery in the family was: How’d they afford it? Everybody knew Carl never made much. He sold farm equipment, and every once in a while, a car. But it never, well ... Nina used to say Carl was too honest to be a good salesman. Her family used to say it just wasn’t in him to do any more than get by: it was Nina who had all the get-up-and-go. And that’s how you’d hear it in town, as Nina came from a family of thirteen children—and ten of them lived—so there were Pritchards everywhere. On the other hand, the Hartpence side came from a farm out of town; Carl only had a couple of brothers, and one of them, George, didn’t cut much of a figure ... in Ottawa, Hartpence wasn’t a name of great lustre.

Anyway, hers were always the last sounds Gary heard, just as they were, years before, when she would read to him, until she switched off the light and he sank into the smell of fresh bed linens. There was always the scent of just-cleaned in the house: Nina (her name even rhymed with Bina Dole’s) was another Kansas woman for whom everything had to be just so. There wasn’t much in the place—furniture, or fancy things—but Nina cleaned every day, as her Pritchard sisters used to say, “top to bottom.” And sometimes, there’d be the smell of fresh cookies, or a cake with sweet promise for tomorrow. In later years, after Gary left, and Nina stopped cooking, people forgot: talked about her like she couldn’t cook at all. But while he was there, it was Nina who did for the whole family. On big days—Thanksgiving, Christmas—she’d overdo: turkey, oyster dressing, candied apples ... and a coconut cream pie that would absolutely curl your toes. Nina could bake the best chocolate cake (no recipe, either—she’d just start stirring), and she’d never get a speck of flour on the counter: she was neat, organized. That’s why the other Pritchard children leaned on her so: “Well,” they’d say, “it’s no trouble for Nina ...” Of course, it was: she just didn’t show it. Gary knew. Sometimes, as he lay in the dark, he’d hear her still going, snapping things back into kitchen cupboards (nothing stayed out of place overnight) and sliding drawers shut, the sounds punctuating the song of crickets outside or perhaps the mile-long rumble of a freight train rolling through town in the night.

East-west train ... had to be the Missouri Pacific. There was a time when Gary knew every train, and not just the Mo-Pac, but the Santa Fe, too, and not just the names and destinations, but the roaring steam locomotives that pulled them, and their wheel bases and their engine weights. He and his cousin, Jon, fell in love with trains—of course, they were Pritchards, and the men in that clan had all put in time on the tracks: they were section hands, gandy dancers; but Gary and Jon made a
study
of it... till the diesels came in, and then it wasn’t the same ... just a train in the night.

That was the way Gary was about things: a boy with a restless hunger to know. He was a reader, like Nina, and with that, too, he’d run through periods of particular infatuation. He read everything by L. Frank Baum (the fellow who invented the Wizard of Oz), and then Gary lived and dreamed the Wild West, eating his way through a score of Zane Grey books in the little stone library across from school. Lately it was Robert Heinlein, sci-fi books, which coincided with Gary’s interest in rocketry. He and Art Harkins, the school’s science geek, made their own black powder (enough to blow up Art’s house, they figured), and now they were building a rocket.

Gary wanted to know everything. In fifth grade at the Lincoln School, his teacher, Mrs. Hannah, put up a chart with everybody’s name, and each time a student read a book, she’d paste a star next to that name. After a while, Gary’s name looked like the Milky Way. But he didn’t read books for the stars on his chart, or even marks—though he got straight A’s. It didn’t even start with school. When he was six years old, he signed a family guest book: “Professor Gary.”

Education was an absolute in that household. Both Nina and Carl had to leave school to work. One thing Gary always knew: he was going to study; he was going to college; he was going to be better off than his folks. He could never forget the hurt in the house when his older sister, Nancy, left school to get married. Nina was crushed. She felt such a failure. Nancy was willful, full of life and fun, but the kind of girl who just got by in school. When Nancy took up with boys, Nina saw her off to an all-girls academy in Arkansas. But Nancy soon came back. When she met Bob Brenner and things got serious, Nina just fretted herself sick. Bob was a big, easygoing man, come up from Texas to Ottawa on a construction job. Whenever he’d come over to the house, Nina would go stiff with worry and anger that she couldn’t let out. It used to make Bob laugh to see Nina fidget on her couch, plainly dressed, with her hair pulled up in a severe bun, as the Nazarene Church prescribed. Nina finally made Nancy vow she wouldn’t see Bob anymore. Nancy promised. But she married him anyway.

It was different with Gary: Nina never had to scold him, never even raised her voice. He always minded. He was quiet and polite, a bit formal for a boy his age, and respectful of her—of all adults. When the Pritchard ladies would come by for coffee and a good giggling visit with Nina, the talk would drive Carl out of the house. “Aw, come on, now,” he’d say, as he got up, “you just sit around and gossip, and you don’t know what the truth is ...” He’d go out to the backyard, or to Lee’s Downtowner, a restaurant on Main Street, to talk with his pals about hunting or cars. But Gary would stay in the room, he’d listen to
everything
. You could almost
see
him listening, with those big ears sticking off his head.

Gary had strong Pritchard bones that gave his face a serious look beyond his years, like his features had got to full size before he did. In fact, since his birthday was late November, and the cutoff for school enrollment in each grade was January 1, for many years he was small among the kids in his grade. And you couldn’t call him stylish. He never had, for instance, just the right shoes, the Nunn-Bush, or the whippiest Florsheim’s, from Paine’s Shoe Store on Main Street (where they had an X-ray machine so you could wiggle and watch all the bones in your feet!), and certainly, he never wore his sleeves and cuffs rolled up, like the athletes. He was, instead, always neat, with clean wash-pants and a sport shirt. (Carl’s brothers used to say that kid never once got dirty!) Nina laid his clothes out for him, all the way through high school. By the time he was older, he wished she’d stop, but he never said anything.

That’s one of the reasons there was always time: she organized him. Nina made sure there was time to study, time to do his assignments, and more. Nina put the fear of God into Gary’s friends. They’d show up at the door, and ask if Gary could play, and she’d just say no. Nothing more ... no. To hear them talk, she was ferocious, standing in the door, plain and pale, with her hair yanked back in that churchly bun, and her eyes just staring them down. Scared them to death! But Gary never saw her like that. In fact, everyone who really knew her noticed her softness whenever she looked at him, the tenderness, devotion: there were no words for it, except Perfect Love.

That’s what they talked about at her church, Perfect Love: of course, they meant it toward God, as well as man. The central doctrine of the Nazarene Church was Entire Sanctification, which meant a second, higher level of religious experience,
after
salvation and acceptance into the church. It was, for Nazarenes, a distinctive act of God
for them
, a personal intervention by the Holy Spirit, to cleanse the deep stains of inherited sin, to imbue them with holiness, which would not wear off, which should only grow, which made possible a life of thoroughgoing grace. In the words of John Wesley, the great Methodist, whose teachings were the inspiration for the movement, this Entire Sanctification made possible Christian perfection ... Perfect Love.

Nina wasn’t so much caught up in the theology. When she found the Nazarenes, just after the war, when Gary was maybe eight or nine, she simply found a church home for herself and her family. It was mostly outsiders who made such a fuss about the rules (the Godly Walk: no alcohol or tobacco; no personal adornment; no secular entertainments, movies, card games, dances, or the like). But Nina had been raised strict Baptist—no alcohol or cards in the Pritchard house, either (though her father, Willard, did enjoy his pipe)—so the rules weren’t strange, or severe. In Ottawa, there were always more churches than bars, and most people were straitlaced. In fact, in those days, Ottawa U, which was a Baptist institution, still played basketball in long pants. For Nina, the difference lay in size, and sense of purpose: the Nazarenes were a small congregation, a fellowship—the pastor was always a family friend—and the church wasn’t so worldly, caught up in wealth or status. In Ottawa, the Church of the Nazarene still wore with pride the air of a movement, of a Wesleyan mission where the Lord’s poor and needy were ushered to the front pew.

That was a part Gary liked, too: the church was there to help people in this life. Everybody talked about how tough the Nazarenes were, but really, they weren’t so fixated, like others, on the sins of man. The point was redemption, on this earth, now. The point was people could be better ... perfect! It was a beautiful idea. Of course, Carl joined the church, and Nancy went along, too—she was a gifted singer in the choir. But the way Gary was, he went into it to know, to understand: he was serious about things. ... He was about ten when he went to the front of the simple church on Seventh Street, to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. It wasn’t more than a year later, he said he was going to be a minister.

Nina was so proud! She’d beam as she told her sisters and his cousins: Gary’s going to pastor a church! It was a great work, bringing salvation. In those days, before the television came, Nina’d do housework with the company of the radio, a big stand-alone tube set, aglow with the voice of Billy Graham. And sometimes, she’d mention what a wonderful man that Mr. Graham was, all the important work he was doing. She didn’t talk like that about too many people. She may even have sent him money—although, Lord knows, there wasn’t a pile to spare. Carl and Nina usually rented their houses (there were lots of houses; Nina liked to move), but the one they owned on Seventh Street they sold, without profit, as a good deed, to the church for a parsonage. Nina believed in living her ideas. Of course, Gary understood. That was one of the early things he knew whole—ideas had power, they had to make a difference in life. If not, what was the point?

And it was the great joy of Nina’s life that
she knew Gary understood
. She had such confidence in him. Years later, when he turned away from the ministry and went to law school, people thought Nina would be heartbroken. But they missed the point. She wanted for him what
he
wanted. She knew he would always do good works in the world. He didn’t have to be a minister ... for God had already worked His blessed way in Gary’s life, and in hers.

See, Nina was told she couldn’t have children. That’s why she and Carl went to Kansas City and adopted Nancy. Then, a few years later, Nina thought she had a tumor. She had no idea ...

She was twenty-eight when she delivered. She was in hard labor for three straight days. They were just about to bring in a doctor from Kansas City, to do a C-section, when Gary finally came out. Leila, her sister, was in the hospital with her, and she took the baby off to the nursery, cleaned him up, and put stickum on his head, to curl his baby hair. Nina was so thrilled that she had a curly-headed little boy! It made the delivery somehow more wondrous. Of course, the next day, when the nurse bathed the boy, his hair was straight. In fact, it looked like a brush pile!

But it didn’t matter. Not to Nina. Gary was her personal gift ... a distinctive act of
God for her
. ... And that was the first thing Gary just knew: it didn’t matter what else happened ... he was her miracle.

You could tell it was Hart in the photo, though the winter-morning light was not the best—his hair looked like a brush pile!

Actually, there were two photos—one was of the woman. The detective’s report said the woman came out to her doorstep, about 7:00
A.M
. that Sunday, December 21, 1986. That was her in the first photo. She looked up and down the street, she picked up her paper. The second photo was snapped a minute later, when Hart came out. You could read the number of the house, behind him: 1006. That’s how they’d retrace the trail ... months later.

Months later, everybody-in-the-know would say: this was the wrong woman! Word around Washington was, the detective was hired by former Senator Joe Tydings—trying to catch Hart with his wife, Terry. (They were in the middle of a horrible divorce.) Just Hart’s bad luck—the detective trailed him to someone else! ... For his part, Joe Tydings told anyone who asked that he had nothing to do with that report, he never hired a detective.

Hart was convinced, he’d been followed for months. Joe Tydings was too cheap for that. (“A notorious tightwad,” Hart insisted.) Anyway,
any husband
who is trying to get the goods on his wife has the wife followed—not the man. (Why would the detective follow Hart to Virginia, to a radio studio, where he made the response to Ronald Reagan?) Hart thought maybe it was organized labor, or organized crime, or organized ... well, he loved spy plots.

But by the time those pictures and the detective’s report surfaced at
The Washington Post
, no one wanted to hear any theories from Hart.

By that time,
everybody knew
, the real issue, the only issue, was ... him.

U
SUALLY, IT TOOK A FEW
days before Michael would be his old self. For at least forty-eight hours you could count on finding him quiet, reading in a corner, not eager to do much—oh, maybe he’d cook ... he’d always do the salad. Michael was great in the kitchen. And he’d do his walks, steaming down the sidewalks with weights on his hands. He loved to walk in their neighborhood, with the bridges over the finger creeks and the water lapping at the smooth back lawns, on both sides of the street, every street an island ... and the great tropical fruit trees, avocado and guava; they lost the tall coconut palms a few years back, to the yellow disease that spread from Jamaica—Michael knew all about that. Of course, he was the expert on everything; found out all about the trees, and then he’d
argue
about them
with Tiky, who lived there
, in Fort Lauderdale ... but not right away: at first, he was just walking, working his vents and valves. Even without visible joy, Michael kept his machine in tune.