The Voyeur's Motel Read online

  Gerald was by nature a “loner,” as he acknowledged in his writing. When he was not busy with farm chores, or spying on his aunt, or collecting cards, or riding his horse to grade school each morning, he would often “look up at the sky and know there was something out there for me.” He sometimes carried a juvenile novel about the Wild West, or Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he had borrowed from the town library. His mother had encouraged him to join the library, and while he sat at one of the tables he would glance up at the cases and see hundreds of books with brightly colored spines.

  This was an astonishing sight to a boy who lived in a farm house where books are almost unknown . . . in a rural community lacking a common culture or aesthetic tradition, in the aftermath of the Great Depression in which people like my family and relatives worked, and worked, and had little time for reading more than newspapers . . . I was mesmerized by books, and what might be called “the life of the mind,” and the life that was not manual labor, or farming, or housework, but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities.

  The fact that Gerald had a younger brother was rarely referred to in his writing—except for one occasion when his parents asked that he share his bicycle with Jack, which he did willingly, and on another occasion when Gerald described the two of them standing in proximity to one another outside the house while their father, a onetime semipro baseball player, was trying to teach Gerald how to bunt.

  My father’s arms are around me. His hands are covering my hands, gently pushing them upward on my sturdy Louisville Slugger baseball bat. “You’ve got to choke up,” dad tells me. “The bunt is all about control.” My brother is mowing the front lawn, and he doesn’t pay any attention to dad and me. “A bunt,” dad says, “is a thing of beauty, an opportunity of something good to occur in the future.”

  Maybe he focused exclusively on bunting because we couldn’t hit away in the small backyard of that little house. I think it was more than that, though. The bunt isn’t a game changer, like a home run or a triple. Instead it nudges things along, and keeps the ball as far as possible from where the opponents want it to be, a strategy, brains over brawn, and something my smart dad understood.

  My brother and I haven’t grown up to be Major League long ball hitters. Neither of us has changed the world. In the past few years, we’ve lost jobs, lost our swings, lost our confidence, lost our faith, lost dad. But thanks to him, we are masters of making do, stretching things out, getting the most from what opportunity offers. At keeping it going with nothing more than grit in our hearts, and our grip on the bat, ready for the bunt, that dad taught us.

  Gerald and his brother Jack were both excellent all-around high school athletes, with Gerald being better in baseball, football, and track, and Jack (two inches taller than his six-foot older brother) superior at basketball and he was also one of the best discus throwers in the state.

  During the four years that Gerald was away in the Navy, Jack was in high school. After Gerald’s discharge, his marriage to Donna, and his buying the Manor House Motel, his brother was courting a young Colorado woman he had met in college and, after their marriage, the couple moved to Texas. Jack and his wife taught school there for a while, had children, eventually prospered in the real estate business, and became members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their devotedly Catholic mother, Natalie, was mortified by the news. As she expressed it to Gerald, “Your brother Jack is lost.”

  Neither she nor the rest of her family and kinfolk saw much of Jack after his conversion, but this was of no concern to Gerald. He was absorbed by his own interests and his private life in the attic. When he was not escorting Donna and their two young children for weekend visits to see his parents in the farming community, he was often writing about them and his years growing up with them—doing so while reclining on the attic’s rug with his notebook, his pencil, and a flashlight. This became his regular routine: if he was bored with what he was seeing through the vents—if he was spending hours watching people watching television—he would shift his attentions from voyeurism to his personal history, where he would recall his boyhood adventures in rural Ault and his sorrows during a period of time he never seemed to outgrow.

  The town was truly a rural paradise, surrounded by 2,000 neatly self-sufficient farms that survived the Depression and two World Wars, and the community was energized by the ranchers and farmers who kept Main Street alive. Here everyone knew everyone, and everyone’s story was known. There were churches of every Protestant denomination, and one Catholic parish. Parades were held on Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4, and a week in the middle of January was devoted to the Lamb Feeders Festival. The populace lined up on the main thoroughfare to watch the parades, floats, and home-crowned royalty.

  The town’s everyday royalty were its doctors and dentists, its high school teachers, and the football coach who’d taken the team to the state championships four times in a decade. The town doctors were especially respected and revered, and they still made house calls. The long dark hallway to our doctor’s office on Main Street led steeply upstairs and the black rubber treads on the steps absorbed all sound. The doctor was tall, bald, and sardonic, and he could produce dimes from behind the necks and ears of his young patients, unfurling his closed hand to reveal the sparkle of a coin.

  Following our appointment we’d drive five miles back to the farm, passing the fairgrounds and field, and the dome of the courthouse glowed gold. The hill behind the courthouse was lined with tall trees whose dense, leafy branches met over the street, and the branches appeared to lift as the cars passed. Open fields bordered our farm house, tasseled corn filled them in summer, and thick stalks of freshly mowed hay purified the air in the countryside with the most pleasing smell of all time. Cows grazed the high-banked meadow across the road and glanced over at us placidly. They sometimes spooked and ran off like clumsy girls, rolling their eyes and lolloping out of sight.

  The telephone numbers in our town went from 3 to 5 digits. Ours was 133J2. Aunt Katheryn’s 227R2. My mother’s car was a two-toned 1946 black Mercury sedan. The car was black and white, and flat as a boat. As we arrived home, my father would be cooking home-grown russet fried potatoes in the kitchen, “starting supper,” the only domestic chore he ever performed. I knew he’d learned to peel potatoes in the Army, cutting those peels in one continuous spiral motion.

  My dad, who was past thirty when he entered the Army, met my mother at a Lamb Feeders dance in 1933. He was 26. She was 19. He was handsome, a farmer, and had a car, a 1930 Ford. They married in 1934, the year I was born. In the winter of 1940, when my mother had two children, she was ill and undernourished, retired to bed, and our doctor came to see her. She was now down to nearly 100 pounds. The doctor sat down beside her bed, his black bag on the floor. “Now, Natalie,” he said, while lighting two cigarettes, “we’re going to smoke this last one together.”

  His mother resisted cigarettes, regained her health, and Gerald’s life returned to normal. When he was not helping with farm chores, or attending school, he was wandering around town alone, feeling:

  invisible, beneath the radar of adult supervision. The consequence of so much unsupervised freedom was that I became precociously independent. I don’t mean that my parents didn’t love me, or were negligent in any way, but only that in the 1940s in this part of the country there was not much awareness of danger. It wasn’t uncommon that adolescent boys and girls hitchhiked on roads around the region. I was allowed to see movies alone at the Prince Theater, which was one of those ornate, elegantly decorated dream-palaces first built in the 1920s. In the shadowy opulence of the Prince, as in an unpredictably unfolding dream, I fell under the spell of movies as I had fallen under the spell of books earlier. These serials could be attended for ten cents, but you had to come back the next Saturday to find out what happened.

  Even on weekends the roads were relatively free of motorists, and one day in 1947, when
I was twelve, and skipping stones while walking in the middle of a street, a beautiful flat stone I was skipping took a high hop and went right through the first-floor window of Mr. Thomas’s home.

  My heart froze, and everything inside me screamed: “Run!”

  But I didn’t. I just stood there, not knowing what to do. Then I went up to Mr. Thomas’s front door and knocked. A man’s voice hollered: “Hold on!” I could hear somebody coming down the stairs. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, the door opened, and there stood Mr. Thomas.

  Mr. Thomas was an elderly man, small and slender, and he raised chickens in his backyard, and had a reputation of not being too friendly. He looked at me and said: “What do you want?”

  Now at this moment, I felt I’d made a mistake and I wished I’d run when I had a chance. But it was too late now. So I blurted out: “I was skipping stones, and by accident one hopped across the street and through your window, Mr. Thomas.” By the time I told him everything, I’d nearly fainted from not breathing. Mr. Thomas leaned out around the door and looked at the window.

  “You got any money to pay for it?”

  I told him I didn’t, and asked how much he thought it would cost.

  “It’d run about $1.50 for the glass,” he said, “and then, of course, I’ll have to fix the window. What’s your name, boy?”

  “I’m Gerald Foos.”

  “Well, ask your mother if you can carry water for my chickens after school. If she says yes, I’ll pay you a dollar a week, and you come here every day after school and Saturday mornings. After you pay for the window, you’ll make some money for yourself. How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds fine, Mr. Thomas. I’ll be here, right after school.”

  That was the beginning of one of my best memories. When I left Mr. Thomas, I felt super. I had done the right thing, and it turned out fine. Best of all, I felt I had learned the art of being brave and honest. It just wasn’t talking to friends about being brave—no, this was the real thing, how I wanted to run but didn’t.

  When I told my mother I was making a dollar a week, she said, “As soon as you pay for that window, you can begin giving fifty cents a week for the house, and keep fifty cents for yourself, and no more skipping stones down the street.”

  So every day after school, and on Saturday mornings, I would lug water for the chickens. He had about two hundred. There were eight watering stations scattered throughout the chicken yard, and I had to carry eighteen buckets of water from the house, about 200 feet away, to get the job completed. The whole thing took me about an hour and a half, and I figured that six days times ninety minutes at one dollar a week came out to about eleven cents an hour, which is about what people earned at that time.

  Mr. Thomas was my first adult friend, and he told me chickens are pretty stupid birds. He said, “You can go into the same chicken coup a hundred times, and those birds won’t so much as ruffle a feather, but walk in there wearing a new pair of shoes, or a different hat, and they’ll panic and fly all over the place.”

  I kept quiet, but I didn’t think chickens were all that stupid. It’s just that they don’t like surprises. They feel safe with things they know. That’s really not all that different from a lot of people I know, even if they are peculiar and funny looking.

  FIFTEEN

  TO READ from Gerald Foos’s journal is to learn that his first love in high school was the one lasting love of his lifetime, and to realize that, as a middle-aged man in the attic, he was nostalgic for when people used to watch him and cheered from the grandstands after he had hit a home run or scored a touchdown—and then, after the game, he would wait on the field for the arrival of his sweetheart, the star cheerleader, who would leap high in the air with her legs spread wide before landing lightly in his lap, her legs wrapped around him, and her arms embracing him in a way he would never forget.

  This was in 1953, his senior year, and the local paper regularly printed his picture and described his achievements: “. . . Foos made a beautiful run, escaping a couple of potential tacklers at the line of scrimmage and plowing on after being hit again at the 10 . . .” He scored several touchdowns that year, and soon after Barbara White would be flying into his arms.

  Twenty years later, after they were both married to ­others, and she had moved with her husband to Arizona, Gerald on impulse would sometimes leave the motel and drive alone eighty miles to his hometown. He would tell his wife that he was visiting his mother, Natalie, but he was really visiting the house where Barbara White used to live, and where during late winter afternoons she would smile down at him and, with an outstretched finger, print his name on the misty pane of her bedroom window.

  She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, and also the nicest, because everyone liked her. I had first met her on a blind date arranged by one of her girlfriends, and I forgot about my apprehensions because I always wanted to date Barbara. Her smile greeted me cheerily, and the movie was fine, although I can’t remember what we saw. What I do remember is during the movie I got my arm around her sheepishly, and that we kissed coming home in the car.

  From that first time onward, we went steady for the next two years. We never did anything except hugging and kissing—which in those days, in the early 1950s, was one of the greatest things that ever occurred. Some of the young people who just have sex nowadays don’t know what that feeling is, the feeling of having someone you really love and care about and the only thing you ever do is kiss them. I never had any intention of having sex with Barbara. The only thing I ever did, which broke us up, was the one time I wanted to see her feet.

  We were parked behind the pump that pumps the water for the city of Ault. In those days many of the girls in school wore shoes that had the colors of the football team, which were black and red, and on this night Barbara’s shoes were red and were illuminated from the light coming down from the pump house. As I looked at her shoes I think I was having a transfixed flow back to the toes of my aunt Katheryn, and, almost without thinking, I just reached down—schump!—and took off her shoe!

  She said: “Gerald, what did you do that for?”

  “Oh, I just wanted to see it, and wanted to do it.”

  “Don’t do that again,” she said.

  So I lay the shoe down under her, on the floor of the truck, and we went back to kissing and necking. It was about midnight, or past. And then I saw her stocking foot, and I just thought I wanted to see her entire foot—and just went down and—scoop!—I took the stocking off as quick as I could.

  Oh, she came apart on that! She was angry, and upset, and felt violated. And I had, of course, violated her trust, because I had never before touched any other part of her body except her back, and a shoulder, or arms. I never touched her legs, any place like that, because that was a taboo area, you just didn’t do that, at least from my perspective, in the way I felt in those days. And so, consequently, Barbara immediately jumped out of the truck, stood there, and, while turning around, she pulled off the chain around her neck that had my ring, and she just threw it at the seat.

  “I don’t like it, Gerald,” she said, and then she walked away, limping on one foot.

  So I backed the truck out and pulled it over beside her, and I called out to her: “Hey, Barb, get in here. Quit acting like a dummy,” or something like that. “These people out here will see us and think we’re fighting.”

  “Don’t you think we’re fighting?”

  “Oh come on, Barb, get in the truck. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, okay? You’re my girl . . . just get in the truck, and let’s talk about it.”

  She just kept on walking. Her house was only a block away. And so she limped all the way home.

  Even many years later, years after I’d last seen her, if anyone mentioned her name, I’d fall to pieces. And whenever I drove past the house where she used to live—even if my car radio wasn’t on—I’d hear the voice of Ray Charles singin
g:

  I can’t stop loving you

  I’ve made up my mind

  To live in memory

  Of the lonesome times . . .

  SIXTEEN

  GERALD FOOS’S years in the Navy produced few insights or observations in his writing because, as he later explained to me, his most interesting experiences during this period were “top secret.” After basic training and a tour in Hawaii—a photograph of Foos on the Waikiki Beach shows a spectacularly muscled young man posing bare chested in a bathing suit—he was selected to serve with underwater demolition teams, forerunners of the SEALs. While the Korean War had ended in 1953, he and his fellow crewmen maintained around-the-clock vigilance throughout the next four years while attached to a cruiser named the USS Worcester.

  The ship had been in the Yellow Sea early in the war to assist in amphibious assaults on the North Korean military; but by the time Foos arrived, it had been reassigned to NATO operations in the Mediterranean. On some occasions it was diverted to the Atlantic Ocean with stopovers in such cities as Bar Harbor, Boston, New York, and Norfolk before heading down to Guantanamo and Panama. Although his notes are brief on this subject, he acknowledged losing his virginity thanks to the hospitality of one particular bordello shaded by palm trees at some undisclosed location.

  At sea with him always were erotic images of his aunt Katheryn and lasting recollections of his losing Barbara White. His voyeuristic passions subsided during his service years, diminished by the fear of being discovered and the disgrace he assumed would cling to him if he were dishonorably discharged. He made very few friends while in the Navy and corresponded mainly with his parents. His father, Jake, took care of the sports-card and memorabilia collection in Gerald’s absence, and even added to it by acquiring such valuable items as a baseball signed by the Hall of Fame baseball player Honus Wagner, who was with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early 1900s. Gerald wrote, “My father and I had very little in common except for our love of sports.”