Like me, he stared in disbelief, then shock. There, past the park’s announcements of the day’s activities and its lists of don’ts and tacked-up tourist messages to other tourists, was a lineup of FBI MOST WANTED posters of the kind that kept a gallery of criminals scowling from the wall of every post office in the land. Prominent in its glossy newness was the one featuring HERMAN “DUTCH” BRINKER in bold black letters, full-face on. The photo was many years old, without glasses or for that matter a glass eye, back when he was a Great Lakes seaman, but the similarity to the Herman stunned motionless at my side popped out all too clearly.
A soft strangled sound, which I suspected must be the German cussword of all cusswords, escaped from his lips. Recovering before I did, he glanced around and around, pulling me close as he did so. Whispering, “What we must do, quick, quick,” he rapidly told me how to proceed, and I followed his instructions as blankly as a sleepwalker, edging along the bulletin board as though every piece of paper was of surpassing interest, with him leaning over my shoulder. Reaching the MOST WANTED lineup, he shielded me with his body, checked around again to make sure no one was looking, and when he whispered, “Now!” I ripped down the poster with the awful words ENEMY ALIEN and VIOLATION OF and CONTACT YOUR NEAREST FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION OFFICE AT ONCE IF YOU SPOT THIS SUSPECT and stuffed it inside my jacket.
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DEED DONE, we grabbed up our luggage and retreated to the deck of the Inn yet again, depositing ourselves in a corner farthest from the latest batch of sitters waiting for Old Faithful to live up to its name, which I could have told them it relentlessly would. With a ragged sigh, Herman held out his hand for the poster. Both of us studied the slightly crumpled likeness of the sailor Dutch, as he was then, and the paragraph of official language fully describing him and his offense. He shook his head in despair at the MOST WANTED treatment, definitely the wrong kind of being famous. “You would think I am Killer Boy Dillinger, Public Enemy Number Eins.”
“One,” I automatically corrected. “But why are they after you so bad?”
He passed a hand over his face as if to clear something away, although from his expression it wouldn’t go. “Wisconsin has a senator, like they say, who sees Red anywheres he looks. ‘Foreign’ spells ‘Communist’ to him. And here was I, mystery man with no proof of being American, under his nose all this time?” He bit out the next words. “The FBI, excuse how I must say it, is kissing this Senator McCarthy’s hind end by making me big fugitive.”
“Yeeps, Herman! That’s not fair!”
“No, is politics gone crazy.” He fell silent, looking downcast, the WANTED poster trembling a little in his hand. At last he said almost inaudibly, “Turned me in, she did.”
It took me a moment to gather that in. “Aunt Kate? Aw, she couldn’t, could she? I mean, isn’t there a law or something? What the hell, Herman, she’s your wife.”
He stared at the WANTED poster in his big hands as if asking the same of it, then looked away from the photo of his younger self, from me, from anything except the question that invaded the beautiful park, taking over his voice.
“Who said we are married?”
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YOU COULD HAVE knocked me over with the blink of an eye. Speechless at first, I tried to get my mind around the pair of them living under the same roof, sleeping in the same bed, fighting the same battle every breakfast, all these years without ever—as the saying was—disturbing the preacher.
Thickly I managed to stammer, “But she’s a Brinker, like you. You’ve got to be married for that, don’t you?”
He shook his head. “She took the name, is all. Easier that way. Keep people from thinking we are living”—he really gave his head a shake now, as if trying to clear it—“in sin, hah. More like, in duty. Drafted soldiers, both of us, if you would imagine,” he put it in starkest terms. “From time of Witch of November when—”
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THE STORY WAS, when Fritz Schmidt was lost in the storm that sent the Badger Voyager to the bottom of Lake Michigan and Herman survived but with an eye gone, the new widow Kate, stranded now in her waterfront waitress job, came to see him in the hospital. “All broke up, crying like cloudburst. Tells me she knows what friends Fritz and I was, how hard it is for me, like her. And this”—he tapped alongside the substitute eye—“meant I was without job.” You can about hear her, he mused, declaring this was too much on both of them, it wouldn’t hurt them one time in their lives to do something out of the ordinary. “Said if I wanted place to stay,” he drew the tale to an end, “I could come to the house.” Gazing off, maybe looking back, he shrugged. “Never left.”
Bewildered anew, I blurted, “But all the time I was there, the two of you fought like—”