Leaving Before the Rains Come (18 page)

True, I had been raised with my father’s impatience—“Don’t just stand there, do something!” he admonished frequently—but southern African time had nonetheless always seemed to me to stretch the distance of the sun, the length between seasons, the availability of light. Until now I had spent most of my life among people who dwelt in time, as if it were as unaccountable as air, or sunshine, or the wind, something that allowed life but that didn’t belong to anyone in particular.

Of course I changed and sped up. And in time, Africa changed and sped up too. Almost anywhere you go on the continent, synapses have quickened to accommodate communicating in 140 characters or fewer, to click efficiently through the hundreds of channels on television, to instantly like or dislike some fresh input, to endure the momentary flicker between e-mails sending and receiving. Even the churning slowness of the Internet during Zambia’s steamy rainy season is quick enough to allow Vanessa to bash off e-mails late at night so that they arrive in the middle of my afternoon, appearing as time-lapsed conversations, off by a whole season, and by half a bottle of wine. “Huzzit Al-Bo. It’s stinking
HOT
. We’re like in a Hoven in here. The kids have
SPOTS
from the heat. Need more rain like a cat on a hot tin roof. Lots of love, and hugs Van xoxoxox”

Most of all, coming to America, I didn’t understand the culture of where I had landed. When I opened my mouth, people knew I wasn’t from the United States, but I was white-skinned and blonde, and in every other way appeared to be what people considered a normal-looking, nonminority U.S. citizen. The truth is, though, as much as I spoke English with a noticeable southern African accent, I behaved with an invisible southern African accent. I didn’t understand the luxurious entitlement of choice; I couldn’t see the point of Saran Wrap, I was baffled by garbage-can liners, I was amazed by the idea of heated driveways and roofs.

Also, I had never been anywhere with a community so disconcertingly vigorous and restless as the western side of the Teton Mountains in the early 1990s. People we knew got sick, of course, there were a few deaths—a five-year-old girl whose anesthesia had been botched, a young mother lost to breast cancer, a climber swept to his death in an avalanche—and I knew there were ill, old people because I volunteered for Meals on Wheels in our valley, but such tragedies and misfortunes were an unintegrated intrusion. It was as if anyone not vibrant and relentlessly healthy was sequestered or quarantined into some shuffling sideline.

“What’s been the defining tragedy of your life so far?” I asked Charlie one night after we had put Sarah to bed.

He seemed impatient with the question. “What do you mean?” he wanted to know.

“The worst thing that’s happened to you,” I said.

Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know.” And then, “Why would you ask such a thing?”

I couldn’t tell him at the time. Only long afterward, I realized perhaps I really wanted to know what had happened in my husband’s past, and to his people, because I believed that unless we are vigilant and aware, we are destined to repeat ourselves, generation after generation, more or less distilling the habits and accidents and triumphs of our predecessors and drip-feeding them forward. I wanted to know his family’s eddying sadness, their inescapable patterns not only because I cared about what Charlie’s history had been but also because I was curious about what our future might bring. Although when I saw where he had grown up—in Pennsylvania, with his gentile parents, their pleasant neighborhood, their understated ways, and on his grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming with its beaver ponds, and charming log cabins, and private access to world-class trout fishing—Charlie seemed the textbook recipient of white, male, middle-class American privilege. Nothing bad had happened to him. Nothing bad would happen to him. He would always be okay.

It took me two decades to realize that Charlie’s family had endured more than their fair share of troubles; they just chose not to exploit, exude, and air them. They were the most silent people I had ever encountered, artfully uncommunicative, deeply stilled, as if they had all taken a pact not to leak emotion—pleasant or not—or divulge their motivations. Even after years of acquaintance, it would be hard for an outsider to know that anything at all bad had ever happened in this family, now or in any generation. It was as if the Rosses had figured out the secret to the impossible alchemic wish expressed by the crippled-up Idaho cowboy: they had worked out how to reset their memories every ten years, to erase pointless nostalgia, to relentlessly pursue the future.

This was utterly foreign to me. Even glimpsing us Fullers very briefly and from a great distance, a person would realize we had encountered worlds of pain and we still wore that pain, as if we had swum in an ocean of it and had forgotten afterward to towel off the emotional kelp and the eccentric boas of woebegone seaweed. There was the immoderation, of course, the excessive insouciance, the unbridled bonhomie—all a tip-off that stick around long enough and hilarity would likely end in tears. It’s true that we had been raised to maintain a stiff upper lip, and sometimes we did. But also, perhaps because there were so few condemning witnesses to our behavior, it didn’t matter if we spectacularly dissolved.

Like most drinking families, we usually aired our feelings late at night. It was when someone sighed and warned the others, “Oh, careful now, Bobo’s getting tired and emotional.” It was when Dad sometimes leapt on the dining room table and roared, “Music, maestro! Music!” It was when Mum admitted, “Oh dear, rather too much excitement, I’m afraid,” and gestured that her legs no longer worked. And it was when Vanessa reached behind her and started to fling bottles at whoever was standing in the way, declaring in a voice of deadly calm, “Okay, that’s it. I’ve had enough.”

Charlie’s family didn’t seem to get drunk, and they certainly didn’t speak of their losses and tragedies. They didn’t roar and battle and laugh, but neither did they harangue and confess and sob. It was as if they were terrified of losing control, but I could not imagine of what. And when they did speak of their deepest grief, they did so with such a civil overlay of commanding restraint, I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t hear them. Perhaps I willfully
wouldn’t
hear them.

In southern and central Africa, tragedy roared at us, and we roared back. We shared our dramas publicly, bled them on the corridors of hospitals, laid our corpses on the beds of neighbors, held our sorrows up in full light. We were volume ten about our madness and disorder, even if we were also resilient and enduring and tough. We survived magnificently, and pretended to qualities of stoicism, but actually, even the most silent of us shouted the disordered history of our lives in our bodies and habits.

On the other hand, Charlie’s inherited sorrows were spoken so softly and so reluctantly, I didn’t register them as ongoing torments. I barely registered them at all. It took me longer than it should have before I finally understood that his family too had had children carried off by disease, they too had had fatal accidents, they too had known the living waste of drunkenness. Most astonishingly, it took me longer than a decade before I realized that his family had endured a tragedy of such moment, it set the standard for such tragedies: Charlie’s great-great-uncle had been the victim of the first kidnapping for ransom in the United States.

On July 1, 1874, little Charles Brewster Ross, aged four, and his eight-year-old brother Walter were snatched from the front yard of their home in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Walter managed to get free and find his way home, but as far as anyone knows—and at least as far as the Ross family is concerned—little Charley was never seen again. Little Charley’s father, Christian K. Ross, was thought to be very wealthy, but he had been nearly bankrupted by the stock market crash of 1873, and the exorbitant ransom demanded by the kidnappers in a series of semiliterate notes was well beyond his reach. His friends offered to take up a collection to meet the kidnappers’ demands, but Christian refused, having been advised by the authorities that paying the ransom would encourage other would-be kidnappers to follow suit with other families.

Initially, having no precedent for such a crime, the Philadelphia police told little Charley’s distraught father that drunks had likely snatched away the child, and would return him as soon as they sobered up. When it became apparent it was not a drunken lark, but rather a kidnapping for ransom, the case became a national sensation, precipitating one of the largest manhunts of the nineteenth century. Seven hundred thousand flyers were distributed with a sketch of little Charley and a detailed description that reads as the agonized longing of a mother who has kissed and breathed every inch of her lost child’s skin. “He is about four years old; his body and his limbs are straight and well formed; he has a full, round face: small chin with noticeable dimple; very regular and pretty dimpled hands; small well-formed neck . . .”

Three weeks after the kidnapping, the mayor of Philadelphia announced a $20,000 reward for information that would lead to either the lost child or his captors. Telegraphs spread the word across the country, and pandemonium ensued. Impostors, do-gooders, spiritualists, and conspiracy theorists clamored to offer intelligence and their services. Parents dressed their children up—girls as well as boys, of every age—in the hope they would pass as little Charley and become absorbed into this illustrious and respectable family.

In December 1874, little Charley’s kidnappers were shot while attempting a burglary. One of them died instantly, but the other confessed to the abduction on his deathbed although he would not give the child’s whereabouts. “The boy will get home all right,” the kidnapper is reported to have said. Christian spent the rest of his life, and the remainder of whatever money had survived the 1873 stock market crash, traveling the world, searching in vain for his lost son. He died of heart failure in 1897. Thereafter, little Charley’s mother, Sarah Ann, took up the search until her death, also of heart failure, in 1912.

The kidnapping became the Ross family’s most enduring personal secret, to the degree that anything so glaringly public could remain under wraps. After the ransom notes, missing for over a century, were unaccountably and accidentally discovered in the basement of a school librarian’s house in northwestern Pennsylvania in March 2012, little Charley’s grandnephew, Chris Ross, a nine-term Pennsylvania state representative, said that his parents’ generation didn’t speak of the disappearance. It was, he said, a forbidden subject. He also said he had no interest in purchasing the ransom notes when they came up for auction. They had, he claimed, caused his family much sadness and trouble and harm.
5
It seemed he would prefer the whole affair forgotten.

But a family’s withdrawal, grief, and reticence do not stop a public’s participation, curiosity, and prurience. In the years after the crime, until it was torn down, the Ross mansion—a grand Victorian Italianate set back from the road—was one of Philadelphia’s most visited tourist destinations. “This high old standing home on Washington Lane has melancholy interest all its own,” one contemporary wrote in
Ladies’ Home Journal
. “It is preeminently Philadelphia’s House of Sorrow.”
6

Songs were written, “Bring Back Our Darling” and “I Want to See Mama Once More.” Dozens of articles and books were written about the case: Carrie Hagen’s
We Is Got Him: The Kidnapping That Changed America
and Norman Zierold’s
Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America’s First Kidnapping for Ransom
. In the summer of 2000, for an article in the journal
Pennsylvania History,
Thomas Everly wrote, “Journalists, dime store novelists, mystery writers, amateur historians and crime anthropologists all re-told the narrative in periodicals such as
The Daily Graphic
and
Headline Detective
and books entitled
Mysteries of the Missing
and
The Snatch Racket
.”

But most harrowing and heartbreaking was the 1876 best seller, written in the desperate hope that one day little Charley would read it, recognize his own story, and make himself known to his family:
The Father’s Story of Charley Ross the Kidnapped Child: Containing a Full and Complete Account of the Abduction of Charles Brewster Ross from the Home of His Parents in Germantown, with the Pursuit of the Abductors and Their Tragic Death; the Various Incidents Connected with the Search of the Lost Boy, the Discovery of Other Lost Children, Etc. Etc. With Fac-Similes of Letter from the Abductors. The Whole Carefully Prepared from His Own Notes and Memoranda and from Information Obtained from the Detective Police and Others Engaged in the Search. By Christian K. Ross of Germantown (Philadelphia).

It’s the longest subtitle I’ve ever read, and certainly the most agonized. It was as if, from the outset, Christian could not contain the urgency and insistence of his paternal grief, his “bereavement sharper than death,” as the introduction to the book would have it. But although little Charley’s siblings, the five remaining Ross children, continued to receive claims for decades—thousands of boys, teenagers, and, eventually, men all professing to be the kidnapped child—none of them checked out to any satisfaction.

The only witness to little Charley’s kidnapping, his older brother Walter Ross, grew up and eventually married a beautiful socialite, Julia Peabody Chandler, with whom he had five children. The eldest son was named after himself, Walter Lewis. The second son bore two-thirds of the name of his lost brother, Charles Chandler Ross. It was this Charles Chandler for whom my husband was named, as if the family could not quite give up the memory of little Charley, but was reluctant to impose the full title of the lost child—Charles Brewster Ross—on anyone.

In spite of his early and enduring tragedy, or perhaps because of the morality tale of his father’s lost wealth, Walter Ross was a roaring success by any standard. In 1899, he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for a then record sum of $29,000. In 1927, avoiding by two years a repeat of his father’s experience with a stock market crash, he sold it for another record sum of $270,000. Walter and his wife were listed in the Social Register and were members of the Germantown Cricket Club; they had a luxurious home on Chestnut Hill and a summer escape on Saranac Lake.