I blasted the radio and opened the windows to let in cool air, trying to keep Charlotte awake until we’d gotten home and I could move her to the crib. She fell asleep regardless. I carried the insert to the nursery, turned on the white noise, and crept out.
That morning’s coffee had gone tepid. I added milk straight to the carafe, gulping it while leaning over the kitchenette counter with my laptop and notepad.
A 1994 obituary in the East Bay Times noted the peaceful passing of Helen Franchette, aged sixty-seven, of Walnut Creek. She was survived by son Norman Franchette and daughter Claudia (Darren) Aldrich, as well as grandchildren Alexis and Hannah.
I found it interesting that Helen had kept her married name.
Conventions of the era?
Unable to let go?
Norman, too, despite his animosity toward his father.
Perhaps they’d reconciled.
Peter Franchette had asked me to find him a sibling. I’d gone one better and found two. Half siblings, yes. But a pair of those seemed preferable to one full sister who might not be real.
I decided to wait to tell him until I’d spoken to them first. While Peter had never known about Norman and Claudia, the reverse wasn’t necessarily true. Per Delia Moskowitz, Norman was an angry teenager during the divorce, putting him in his early to midtwenties by 1974, when Peter came along. I expected Claudia to be in the same ballpark. Old enough to be aware of the birth of a half brother. And to resent him: He was the incarnation of their childhood unhappiness.
Unless Helen and the children had cut ties with Gene after the divorce. Or Gene had managed to conceal Peter’s existence from them.
Keeping secrets did appear to be a family trait.
I began looking for Claudia and Norman Franchette.
—
IT’S HARD TO hide these days.
The information was always there. Lurking in property tax rolls, collecting dust at the local recorder’s office. But you had to know where to look and how to ask.
You drove to a grungy civic center, in a dispossessed county seat, with crappy parking. You stood in line and smiled at the petty bureaucrat who rejected your form because you’d forgotten to check box 7b.
You slunk to the back of the line again. Learned that another request required a different office. Three blocks away.
Don’t forget to feed the meter.
Arms overflowing with red tape and paper, you learned how to assemble that paper into the shape of a human being, gleaning desire and intention and sin from the hieroglyphics of bureaucracy.
Now kick back and let the internet do the work for you. A few clicks bring an alarmingly intimate smorgasbord: current and prior addresses, landline, cell, warrants, traffic records, liens, judgments, bankruptcies, foreclosures, gun licenses, family and associates.
A tidy report with easy-to-read graphics is available instantly for $9.99. Or subscribe monthly for unlimited access. All you need is a credit card.
If, like me, you work someplace that subscribes to the right databases, you don’t even need that.
The casual destruction of privacy is one of the most momentous and least visible social revolutions of our time, and the safeguards to anonymity that remain are largely a function of numbers—what I call the Big World Problem.
It’s a Big World, inhabited by hordes of John Aguilars and Sarah Kims.
Fewer Reginald Beards or Desiree Ameses, but even they can number in the dozens.
Only one Pondicherri Sauvage that I’d ever encountered.
Suicide; pills.
I’m not blaming her name. I’m also not not blaming her name.
Other variables that muddy the waters include age, geography, and socioeconomic status. An impoverished ninety-year-old shut-in wasting away in Queens leaves a lighter trace than a duck-faced, wannabe-influencer tween posting every frame of her aymayzing life keepin it classy in Biloxi.
Too often database results turn out to be incomplete or misleading or overly inclusive. Scraper algorithms indiscriminately suck up every available byte. They upgrade forgotten acquaintances to blood relatives. Frequently I’m looking for people at the margins of society. Getting to them is still more art than science, requiring a human touch and abundant patience.
There was, or had been, a woman named Claudia Aldrich who taught economics at Emory. Her CV testified to a long, distinguished career. Bachelor’s from Columbia. Doctorate from the University of Chicago by the age of twenty-four. Beverly’s spiritual child, though not her biological one.
Her name brought up scores of publications in academic journals, the earliest of which attributed authorship to Franchette, C. Then Franchette-Aldrich, C. At some point she must’ve tired of writing out a seventeen-letter surname, because she dropped Franchette.
A notice in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, dated last August, mourned her death at sixty-seven—the same age Helen had been when she passed. She was survived by her husband, Darren; her daughters Alexis and Hannah; and one granddaughter, Isabella.
A picture accompanied the text. As with Peter, Gene’s genes carried the day. Lantern jaw; hard stare, ripe with judgment. It spoke volumes that this was the most flattering photo her family could come up with.
I was down to Norman.
At first blush, he didn’t seem like a very sociable fellow. Other than Helen’s obituary, I found nothing but reams of autogenerated garbage.
Claudia’s obit made no mention of him.
Bad blood with her as well as Dad?
Time to shift gears. Yearbooks had been good to me, and I went back to the well, finding Norman in the Berkeley High graduating class of 1966. He looked miserable: unshaven and cowlicked, head an inverted gumdrop wobbling at the end of a too-long neck. Cheeks bunched as if bracing for impact.
Not much resemblance to Peter, Gene, or Claudia. Maybe he took after Helen.
No extracurriculars.
Troubled boy.
How troubled?
I wanted to know more about him. More about this fire.
The following morning, with Amy on baby duty, I drove to downtown Berkeley, hoping to answer both questions.
—
THE PUBLIC SAFETY Building sat opposite the Peace Wall, conflicting principles fashioned from the same municipal concrete. I started upstairs, at the fire department, where I spoke to a man with incredible hair. I’ve never met a firefighter who doesn’t have great hair.
The guy was a captain named Jason Oblischer. In addition to his crown of platinum, he sported the physique of someone who fills idle moments with push-ups. He walked with a slight limp, adding to his charm, as you imagined the valiant cause of his injury.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, meaning it.
That’s another thing about firefighters. They’re happy to see people, because people are happy to see them. You can be on the meanest street in Oakland, guys shooting at each other from behind garbage cans, and they’ll break to let a fire engine through.
Hold up. Hold up.
Cause, who knows where that truck is headed? Their cousin’s house, maybe.
Besides, whose heart is so cold that he doesn’t enjoy a nice, shiny fire truck?
I showed Oblischer my badge but added that I was on my own time.
He scratched a well-formed chin. “Nineteen seventy, the file’s gonna be in storage. Yeah. See?” He showed me on his monitor: The search form wouldn’t accept a date prior to January 1991. “I can email them and ask to send it over.”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Oblischer said.
Meaning it. Firefighters.
—
I DESCENDED ONE flight to the police department. The shift in mood was palpable, like jumping out of a warm bath, only to discover you have no towels. Same result, though. I gave the desk sergeant my spiel and was told: “Not in the computer.”
He didn’t offer to email storage. He handed me a form.
I filled it out, then watched him stick it at the bottom of the inbox tray and begin excavating his ear canal.
Eager to speed things along, I asked if Nate Schickman was around.
“Why?”
“Buddy of mine.”
He hollered over his shoulder: “Anybody seen Schickman?”
The answer drifted back: People’s Park.
“What’s he doing there?” I asked.
The sergeant extracted an orange gob from his ear, gazed at it contemplatively. “With any luck, not getting pissed on.”
—
I PARKED ON Channing and continued on foot, paddling upstream against students in yoga pants and North Face, lost in their earbuds and sipping boba tea. It had been a month since the debacle at Zellerbach Hall. Life had resumed on Telegraph Avenue, windows reglazed, graffiti scoured off or vanquished by new graffiti. Allow for the neighborhood’s baseline grunginess and you could be forgiven for thinking nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
But as I got closer, I felt it again: the subsonic growl Davenport and I had picked up the night we came for the bones.
Subtler, now. The pot brought down to a simmer.
With numerous lawsuits pending, Alameda County Superior Court judge Sharon Feeley had issued a temporary injunction prohibiting construction at People’s Park until such time as she could get the claims sorted out and consolidated. Together with the other groups aiming to preserve the status quo, the Defenders of the Park, led by Chloe Bellara, Sarah Whelan, and Trevor Whitman, had declared the ruling a victory.
The University of California had immediately filed a motion to vacate the injunction. But the administration had been set back on their heels. To prevent further damage to their equipment, Siefkin Brothers, Builders, had retreated.
I turned the corner for the park, made a slow tour of the perimeter.
The trailers were gone. The fence was gone. The heavy machinery had been evacuated, save a hamstrung front-end loader missing three tires and repurposed as a jungle gym. The basketball court lay in rubble, like the aftermath of a drone strike. In place of the Free Speech Stage gaped the pit.
The mess had done little to discourage attendance. To the contrary: Galvanized by crisis, The People had shown up in force, creating a morbidly festive atmosphere. On a normal day you’d have fifty bodies dotting the acreage. Now I estimated five times that.
A team of volunteers in gloves and kneepads toiled to rebuild the demolished garden. Beneath a gazebo fashioned from tarp and PVC pipe, a pair of women ran a rudimentary woodshop, churning out planter boxes and plank benches.
Restoration of the lawns had also begun, mounds leveled out and holes partway filled, gentling the landscape so that it evoked less a war zone and more an inadequately maintained mini-golf course. Parkies smoked, swigged, orated, bartered; either underdressed for the weather or swollen by fifteen sweat-soaked layers. Hip-hop pulsed. Malnourished dogs scrounged. A grizzled man wearing a FACEBOOK T-shirt pushed a shopping cart brimming with recyclables in a tight, determined circle.
Outside the bathrooms, a group squatted at the curb, shooting dice. Murals and mottoes scaled the building exterior.
We didn’t ask permission we just got busy.
The homeless encampment stretched clear to College Avenue.
Stationed at each corner, twiddling his or her thumbs, was a Berkeley city cop.
Bowditch proved the liveliest stretch, home to the tree-sitters. A man in a pig mask perched high in the branches of an American elm, reciting Marx through a megaphone.
What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own gravediggers.
On the pavement below, a man pushed a shopping cart back and forth, mirror image of the guy with the Facebook shirt, except this guy’s hat said GOOGLE.
At the corner of Dwight, someone had added a sticker to the stop sign, creating a new message.
Nate Schickman leaned against the pole, staring sourly at the pavement. He tensed at my approach, then recognized me and broke into a relieved smile, bounding forward to give me a bro hug.
“What’s up, man?” The Kevlar beneath his uniform made it feel like I was embracing a refrigerator. “Been a minute. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
“Just taking a stroll.”
“At your friendly neighborhood civil disobedience zone.”
“I was down at the PD. They told me you’d be here.”
“Oh, I’m here all right.”
“What happened to homicide?”
“Done-zo. City policy: four-year rotation, back on the street. So we ‘stay grounded in the community.’ ”
Our conversation had attracted the attention of the man in the pig mask. Raising the megaphone to his snout, he began to chant in our direction.
All. Cops. Are. Bastards.
I said, “Is there an endgame?”
Nate looked at me like I was insane to even ask.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Rules of engagement?”
He recited drearily: Stand down. Expect to be tested, insulted, recorded. Remain calm. Remain polite. Do not intimidate, harass, or threaten. Regard arrest as a measure of absolute last resort.
No helmets. No shields.
Direct orders from City Hall.
I got the intent. A horde of Blue Meanies in riot gear recalled, in all the wrong ways, those iconic photographs from 1969.
National Guardsmen squaring off with flower children. A helicopter spewing tear gas; a daisy jammed in the barrel of a rifle.
Still, it seemed a bit much to demand of the front line. I’d taken the desk sergeant’s comment about getting pissed on as sarcasm. But Schickman told me he’d had a bucket tossed at him two days ago.
“Aw, man, I’m sorry.”
“No big deal, he barely got me. Smelled weird, though. Probably vegan or keto or whatever.”
The chant had been taken up by other voices.
All cops, are bastards.
Middle fingers sprouted in the canopy, like wrathful, fleshy fruit.
He said, “What can I do for you?”
“Does there have to be something?”
He laughed.
I said, “Old arson. I put a file request in but I’m not sure it’s gonna see the light of day.”
“Who’d you give it to.”
“Sergeant Kalb.”
“You’re right to worry,” he said. “You want me to follow up?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not a thing.”
“Thanks, brother. I’ll send you details.”
All. Cops. Are. Bastards.
Schickman started for his post. “Send me a poncho.”
—
ON THE WAY back to my car I stopped along Dwight to watch the gardeners at work. They were a multigenerational group: elderly hippies and their modern-day equivalents in muddy overalls. They’d made progress, laying out paths of crushed stone and cutting new beds. I had to admit that it was a vast improvement on the demolished garden, which I’d only ever seen in disrepair.
Pot smoke rose in mini-thermals. Inside the Free Speech Pit, something fluttered.
I crossed the lawn to have a look.
Down in the dirt was a weather-beaten jumble of flowers, pictures, trinkets, and toys: a shrine to the dead child.
Notes tucked inside sandwich bags, ink bleeding as condensation beaded up.
never forget u
justice for all
Dead votive candles in glass cups.
Mylar balloons, collapsed and tossing listlessly.
A score of stuffed animals, including several teddy bears.
One of which had electric-blue fur.
I stared at it.
How many teddy bears in the world?
How many blue ones?
It’s a Big World.
Blue is everyone’s favorite color.
I glanced around.
The gardeners were gardening.
The parkies were swapping sandwiches and spit.
I hopped into the pit.
The blue bear lay on its side, behind a pink giraffe.
I eased it free with a pen.
Eight inches high, in good condition. Fur clean and soft and bright. It might’ve come out of the package that morning, save a single blemish.
The left eye was missing.
