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“Hi, Dad,” Marti said.

Van Walters, seated in a chair next to a bed, glanced toward Marti and said, “Hello, sweetheart,” in a voice that was barely above a murmur. He turned away.

Marti wouldn’t have recognized her father if she hadn’t already known who he was. His face was whiter, bonier—more so even than toward the end before leaving Dallas. His hair also seemed sparser, and there was a sprinkling of gray in the scant sideburns. He was wearing a heavily starched light blue long-sleeved sport shirt and dark blue slacks that had a uniform look and feel. So did his shoes, black and rubber-soled.

It occurred to her that this was the uniform for crazy people. For psychiatric patients.

Marti, of course, knew exactly what had—almost—happened in the bathroom that afternoon four weeks earlier. Since then she had picked up enough whispered comments either on the phone or from visiting agents or wives for her to know that what ailed her dad was “mental.” And she had overheard the word
depression
used more than once. So this scene in the psychiatric ward came as no real surprise to Marti.

Her mother had her head down now in the hospital room, as if trying to avoid the pain of this reunion—the first time father and daughter had seen each other since the bathroom “accident,” as Rosemary Walters insisted on calling it.

Marti gave no thought to reaching out or touching Van. She had a feeling that if she shook her dad’s hand right now, it might come off in her own. A hug might cause him to break in two.

She tried to connect anyway—her usual way. “I saw in the sports pages that the Cowboys were thinking about signing Roger Staubach to eventually replace Dandy,” Marti said. “They traded Eddie away but I think Dandy’s still able to do the job, Daddy, don’t …”

Rosemary stopped Marti in mid-question with a shake of the head. “Your father has some news,” she said.

News? My father who was going to kill himself a month ago in our bathroom has some news?

As if she were about to dive into the deep end of a swimming pool, she automatically held her breath.

“We’re moving again, sweetheart.” The words were spoken softly, mechanically, and were accompanied by a false, weak grin.

Marti let out part of her breath. In Portland, she was still having her best New Place entry yet. There were two or three girls at Stardust who were fun to be with and helped her meet a lot of people, including a guy named Tommy Johnston, who was cute and friendly and said he had an uncle in Seattle who loved the Cowboys. Marti had gained half an inch in height and had just gotten an A on an English paper she wrote about Katherine Anne Porter’s new collection of short stories that had just won the Pulitzer Prize. Her English teacher was noting Marti’s special interest in and ability to think and write about those major women writers about whom she had become so passionate. Dreams of literary stardom and genius as well as love were forming in her sixteen-year-old head.

“But we’ve only been here a couple of months,” Marti said crossly. “Why are we leaving so soon?”

Her parents were silent.

Suddenly she felt desperate. “Not back to Kansas City, I hope? Dallas would be okay but I love it here, I really do. I know we haven’t been in Portland that long but it’s really neat, the school, the kids, most everything. I don’t want to leave, I really seriously, one hundred percent don’t.”

Marti felt she was going to cry. Not counting the awful scene with her dad in the bathroom, of course, she hadn’t cried in front of her parents since the night of the assassination. She had, however, done so many times since in private.

Van Walters’s face showed he hadn’t expected Marti’s reaction. He attempted a gentle laugh but failed. “Not anyplace like Kansas City or Texas,” he said, finally looking right at her. “It’s an exotic place—overseas.”

When Marti didn’t react, her dad said, “Ever heard of Singapore?”

Singapore
?

“Isn’t that in China or somewhere like that?” Marti blurted out. “Didn’t Somerset Maugham write about it?”

Her dad said: “Maybe, yes … probably. It … yes … It used to be a British colony … part of Malaysia. It’s an island.”

“Why would the Secret Service send you
there
?” Marti asked, her voice now close to a shout.

Her dad looked down and across the room at her mother. Then he said, “I’m leaving the service, sweetheart.” Marti had, up until this very moment, always loved the way her dad called her sweetheart.

And so here was another piece of really big news.

With occasional help from Rosemary, Van mumbled his way through the story. He said he had been hired to be a personal security consultant to the government leaders of Singapore, which had just become an independent country—an island nation-state, it was called. The deal was made by a private American protection company that was founded, owned, and operated by former U.S. Secret Service agents.

“But what about the house?” Marti asked sharply.

“The company will reimburse us for any loss,” Rosemary
said. “They will pay for private schools there, too, if that’s what we end up wanting to do.”

Marti hated that “we.” She knew that “we” was only her and that “they” would decide where “we” would go despite what “she” wanted.

And
Singapore
? She didn’t know if Maugham had ever really written about that place. She didn’t even know what language they spoke there. What sports did they play? What were their girls, boys like?

“I don’t want to graduate from high school in a foreign country!” Marti barked.

Her mother reached out to touch her hand. Her father barely blinked when he said, “We’re leaving in two weeks.”

Now instead of crying she wanted to hit something, yell at somebody, throw something as hard as she could.

“The television network in Singapore carries the Cowboys games,” said her dad, trying to fake another happy smile. “I had somebody at the service check to make sure.”

“We’ll be at the retirement ceremony next week,” Rosemary Walters said, attempting to soothe by changing the subject.

And Van and Marti Walters, father and daughter, waved farewell without touching.

Singapore
?

Only as she was leaving the room did Marti notice faint brownish bruises on the temples of her father’s head. Both were about the size of quarters.

She didn’t need to even check a dictionary to tell her anything
this time. Back at Longfellow one of the boys in Miss DeShirley’s class said he’d read in
The Kansas City Star
, Hemingway’s former newspaper, all about how the great writer had suffered from bad depression. “They gave him shock treatment at the famous Mayo Clinic using wires to his head for two months,” the kid had said, “and then he went home to Idaho and blew his brains out.”

I
T WAS HARDLY
what anyone would call a ceremony.

The special agent in charge of the Portland office, Agent Damon, stood next to his desk, a large flag of the United States on one side and, on the other, a matching one with the gold five-pointed star emblem of the Secret Service on a light blue background. Each point of the star had a word by it—
DUTY, JUSTICE, COURAGE, HONESTY, LOYALTY
.

Van, Rosemary, and Marti Walters, three abreast, faced Agent Damon and the flags. The only other person present was an agent named Frank Landrum, who was off to one side. Landrum had known Van in DC and had also been with him that awful day in Dallas. He was taller and huskier than Van but about the same late-thirties age. Both were dressed in standard agent—dark blue suits, white shirts, and quiet ties.

Marti felt it was a good sign to see her dad dressed normally again, although the dress shirt highlighted how much weight he had lost. The collar was two sizes looser, at least!

“On behalf of the director,” said Damon, who was probably fifty years old, “I would like to read the following letter …

“ ‘Dear Van: It gives me great pleasure to extend to you our
thanks for your dedication to the mission of the United States Secret Service. It is only through the exemplary performance of people like you that our organization rises to the performance level that makes us proud of what we do and the way we do it.

“ ‘On behalf of my colleagues in the service, I thank and honor you for the twelve years you have done your duty as a special agent of the United States Secret Service in keeping with our motto, “Worthy of Trust and Confidence.”

“ ‘The secretary of the Treasury joins me in paying this tribute to you. He notes, too, that a special order has been issued awarding you full retirement benefits and thus exempting you from the regular twenty-years-of-service requirement.

“ ‘Sincerely yours …’ ”

With his left hand Damon gave the letter to Van while he extended his right shaking hand to Van, and then to Rosemary and Marti.

Landrum moved in for handshakes, congratulations—and farewells.

And that was it. The whole thing, from the opening of Damon’s office door, to the Walters family’s exiting that same door, took no longer than five minutes.

In the hallway afterward, Rosemary gave her daughter another piece of news.

“Your dad’s new employer has offered to pay all the expenses for you to attend a boarding school here in the States,” she said to Marti. “That is, of course, if you decide against going to Singapore with us. I understand, believe me, I do. It’s your last year of high school. I understand.”

Marti glanced quickly toward her father, whose frozen expressionless face seemed to be shrinking, vanishing even farther out of sight right before her.

She had a horrifying feeling that she might never see him again.

Marti’s place in Philadelphia was a one-bedroom split-level apartment that was larger and better decorated than any student housing I had ever seen for an undergraduate at Missouri or any other school.

“I live well on the guilt money from Singapore,” she said quickly, having picked up on my silent reaction to her upscale digs.

She had clearly prepared for my visit, even if it came with only a few hours’ notice by phone that morning after I talked to Bernie. Having taken my coat, she led me directly to a box of documents on a desk.

“Here’s the first letter I received from my mother.”

She handed it to me. I read it slowly to myself.

Rosemary added a few words about the good food and fun Americans in Singapore and then closed with a flowery declaration
of everlasting love and devotion from her and “your dad.”

Your dad.

Marti said she hadn’t really expected any letters from her father, but she’d thought her mother might provide an occasional news update about him—definitely not about the awful mental stuff but maybe a few details about the Singapore big shots he was protecting. But all she got from her mother were a few totally unimportant passing “your dad” references. Rosemary spent much of her weekly writing space posing questions to Marti about her new life as a boarding student at St. John’s School, a private Episcopal school for girls in San Antonio. Marti always answered the letters with what she came to refer to as her “Dear Moms.”

Marti couldn’t help herself from noticing what she saw as sure signs of her mother’s ongoing drinking. There was the occasional wavering line in the otherwise perfect penmanship, and dried spots of smudged ink often dotted the margin.

She also thought about doctors in Singapore with Charlie Chan–like smiles giving Van more frequent and higher-powered shock treatments, putting stronger and stronger drugs into him with needles. And, after some terrifying school library research, she feared they might perform a lobotomy. Would they actually cut out part of her poor father’s sick brain? Had her father been taken to Singapore solely so that something special and weird could be done to his head that Americans wouldn’t do? Was there anything worse than a lobotomy?