He felt at home in Japan, like a spy. Standing 5’5”, Walter fit right in with these shy little people, although his ego towered over them. In his civilian clothes, the people he passed on the crowded streets could see he was a foreigner but not a tourist. He blended in. They thought he was a businessman or a pilot if they noticed him at all. Or a spy. Yes—a spy! Walter was sure he saw fear in their eyes as he passed. He did his best to keep his stone expression and not smile.
Walter hadn’t fit in at his last posting: Spangdahlem Air Force Base in Germany, where everyone towered over his slight build and his ego. However, his exceptional skills were critical to the 10th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing at the new American Air Force base. While his memory was not purely eidetic, he read faster than anyone and remembered everything, which proved invaluable to his Air Force assignment in the mid-1950s.
He vaguely described his missions in Germany through letters sent back home to rural western Pennsylvania but didn’t reveal many details about these top-secret adventures, like infiltrating scattered Nazi cells as they re-formed across the devastated landscape. Besides, he explained: all communications were monitored and censored. Walter, the spy, had to be careful.
Mitty, the procurement officer, was the nickname his fellow soldiers gave Walter in Germany: Walter “Mitty.” The base psychiatrist wasn’t sure if Walter was a pathological liar or if he believed the stories he told others; his high IQ made the determination problematic. At any rate, he was deemed harmless enough in his current position as a procurement officer. Mitty was allowed to continue his vital work of quickly reading through requisitions and keeping supplies and materials stocked and in order from his windowless office in the basement of HQ. After all, a shortage of staples in post-war Germany could mean the difference between order and chaos.
“Mitty” hadn’t followed him to Japan from Germany, only the lies and the fantasies.
On one of his short leaves home after his marriage in 1952 to Barbara, a Wilmington, Delaware, legal secretary, Walter flew into Hanscom AFB just outside of Boston. On the recommendation of an Air Force buddy, he spent a weekend in Boston in the apartment of two young working girls, Jean and Lynn. Three days later, Walter took the train to Wilmington to see his very pregnant wife, who was staying with her parents. Barbara was worried: Walter had told her he’d be in Wilmington two days ago. He explained Air Force Intelligence had diverted his team on a short mission; he’d gotten there as soon as possible. As luck would have it, Margaret Elizabeth was born two days later. (Not lucky from Walter’s perspective—he had hoped to avoid witnessing the birth by spending 3 days with Jean and Lynn in Boston.) When it came time to fill out the birth certificate, Walter insisted on changing Margaret Elizabeth (the name Barbara and he had chosen originally) to Lynn Jean.
A year after Lynn’s birth in 1955, Walter moved his family from Wilmington to Oil City, PA, near his parents and many aunts and uncles. On leave between his secret missions of tracking down staples, boot laces, and Ivory soap for the base, Walter would spend a few days with his wife and infant daughter. Mitty spent these inconvenient leaves honing his mission-critical skills, like simulating missile trajectories. It gave him great satisfaction when he could mentally calculate his baby girl’s weight, speed, and launch angle as he dangled her by one foot and tossed her into her crib from ever-increasing distances. Since having the payload fall short of its target would be an unacceptable failure, he ensured the baby’s velocity and trajectory were sufficient to hit the target. On this occasion, Mitty avoided failure by bouncing the payload off the wall precisely onto its target. Walter smiled at his skill momentarily—until little Lynn regained consciousness and began screaming. Successful missions sometimes involved collateral damage, Mitty told himself. Walter tried to explain this after using the back of his hand to stop Barbara’s yelling.
On another leave, when Lynn’s mother was out of the apartment, Walter discovered baby Lynn, now almost 2, was terrified of his electric shaver. So, like any loving, concerned father, he hung the shaver from her by looping the cord around her neck and watched as she ran screaming around the apartment, bumping into walls and tables until she fell screaming to the floor. When Lynn’s mom returned, she called Lynn’s grandmother for advice on how to quiet a baby who had somehow worked herself into hysterics; Lynn’s grandmother could hear Lynn gasping between frenzied cries in the background.
Lynn’s grandfather, a baker and part-time security guard, drove from Wilmington through the night to bang on Walter’s front door very early the following day. Without a word, he escorted his resistant daughter (she didn’t want to leave) and lethargic granddaughter to the car, where Lynn’s grandmother cradled Lynn, and Barbara quietly wept on their way home to Wilmington to stay.
Lynn had made her first escape, if only briefly, but Margaret Elizabeth never had a chance. Lynn buried her, although she never died, escaping to a place inside Lynn and lost forever. If this was a fairytale and you listened very closely, you might hear Margaret Elizabeth softly singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” When you reach the end of Lynn’s story, maybe you’ll notice the song ends with a question sung to an impossible reality.
I wrote that shortly after Lynn died; it was pieced together from tiny clues Lynn gave me over our many years of marriage and from her uncle over weekly pool games in his basement months before he died. Recently, I found what follows—something I’d never seen—on her computer. She may have posted this online at some point but never told me if she had. This is just as I found it on her computer, including the time stamp:
I don’t celebrate it.
My mother married my father in 1952, on her 21st birthday. She wore a dress that looked like a stiff lace lampshade, and he wore his snappy Air Force uniform. She’s wearing flats, and she’s still a trace taller than he is.
I asked her many years later why she’d married him. She said that all her friends were getting married, she wanted to be a mother, and he was there.
The story I heard was that I was born in 1955, and they were divorced in 1957 because he was an unfaithful liar. She had custody of the minor child, me, and moved back home to Delaware.
I’ve gathered part of what might be the real story from relatives and her friends, especially since she died in 2004. He was a liar. He doesn’t know the truth. Facts, fiction, it’s all the same to him. He can read a book and believe, and proclaim, that he was the hero. At my wedding, he told my husband’s uncle that he was a combat pilot in WWII. He was born in 1930.
The real story: he started me on my brain-injury career when he picked me up by one foot and threw me towards my crib. I hit the wall instead. In 1956, they didn’t even believe babies felt pain; I don’t know if I received any medical treatment.
He figured out that I was afraid of his electric shaver and one day when my mother was out he tied it around my neck. She came home to me in whatever state a baby gets into when it’s past hysterics.
That night she called her mother, and cried, and didn’t know what to do. My grandmother said “Come home”. She said no. The next morning my grandfather and my dear Uncle Tommy were on their way to Pittsburgh to bring her home, and they did. She blamed me all her life for the material things (her records, her pictures) that didn’t fit into the car.
I’ve seen him five times in my life. Every time I spent every hour with my insides knotted with fear and I didn’t know why. Once he made a sudden movement towards me and I nearly knocked the dinner table over scrambling away. Everyone laughed. Great care was always taken to not let me know that Something Had Happened, but all that did was make me more sure that something had.
My mother remarried when I was 10, a man who offered her membership in one of the many schismatic sects of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that promises you’ll never go to hell. That, and financial security, meant a lot to her.
Her new husband was on his third marriage. His first wife died under very suspicious circumstances. He had never had children. He was in his late forties; I was a precocious, smartass ten-year-old with highly developed defenses. He collected guns, and had them everywhere, including against my head. My mother was always in the kitchen. Always.
So my mother lived happily with him for 38 years, demanded that I always treat him civilly, and then she got cancer. He caught pneumonia at the same time, and went to the hospital, and the racist filth that poured out of him all the time got noticed and reported and he went off to the state mental hospital, where they diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, and he came out ten months later heavily medicated, and legally unable to own guns. He did not want to care for a cancer patient. He moved to an assisted living place, got a girlfriend, went to court and got his driver’s license back, went to court and got his concealed carry license back, and my mother, knowing that his hatred for me had grown and fulminated, gave him a Glock for Christmas.
And she died. He died three months later.
My father is still alive. I found that out on a Sunday when I did a quick search - I wanted to know where he was - and found him in five seconds. He’s on the Megan’s Law site for the state where he lives, which is too damn close. He’s a Tier 3 offender, lifetime reporting. I can see his picture, find out what cars he drives. I found out that whatever he did was to someone younger than 12.
And there’s no one left to ask. My mother’s family is all dead. I don’t remember. All I have is my fear, and my lifetime feeling that fathers are people who want to hurt you or kill you. I’m nearly 60. I don’t know if there will ever be any relief.
Lynn Loper Jun 21, 2015 9:48am EDT
Email: Tom Loper