Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [106]
Sol sized me up with shrewd blue eyes.
“And Jane will never know?”
“Never.”
I watched Sol weigh the pro’s and con’s of confession. Finally he sighed, and said: “All right. Freddy and Jane’s mother, Louisa Hall, was the love of my life. The most beautiful woman that God ever created. But very disturbed. Suicidal. She loved me, but was abindently attached to her father, who hated me because I was Jewish. He knew of our liaison and mentally tortured her for it. And Louisa took it, withstood it out of love. She couldn’t give up her father and she couldn’t give up me. But she wouldn’t marry me; she knew that it would drive her father away for good. When Freddy was born, something in her snapped. She wanted a baby, desperately; we planned it, I figured that marriage would have to follow, it being 1943. But when Freddy was born, she snapped. She hated him. He repulsed her. She wanted to be rid of him. She wouldn’t nurse him. I had to hire a wet nurse. She gave me an ultimatum: ‘Put him up for adoption or I will leave you forever.’ I couldn’t face that prospect, so I did it. But not through an agency, not formal adoption. I gave him to an old business associate and his wife. They lived near Monterey. They were Russian Jews, immigrants. They Americanized their name to Baker. They gave it to Freddy, even legally adopted him. I got regular reports from Baker, over the years. Freddy was a wild sadistic boy. He killed little animals. I felt guilty, but I put it out of my mind. I was making a lot of money, illegally. I won’t go into it. Things were going well with Louisa. She was getting better, less depressed. In 1951, she told me she wanted another child. After the birth she would marry me. I believed her. We had the baby. Jane was born in March of ’52. Things were good for about a month. We were making wedding plans. I was pulling out of the rackets. Then Louisa’s father committed suicide. Louisa went mad. One evening I caught her trying to strangle Jane in her crib. The look in her eyes, my God!!”
Sol hesitated, faltering, then mustered new resources of candor and went on: “I hired a male nurse to look after Jane. I sent Louisa to the best psychiatrist on the West Coast. He diagnosed her as schizophrenic. I put her into a private sanitarium. When she came out on a visit one day, when Jane was one and a half, we took a drive to the beach and went for a walk on the Palisades. A young couple came by, pushing a baby in a stroller. Louisa saw them and started to scream. She ran to the cliffs, climbed the barrier, and threw herself off. She fell all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway. She died instantly, of course. I was in grief, terrible grief. I blamed myself and I blamed little Jane. I couldn’t live with her. I took her up to the Bakers in Monterey to be with her brother. I told Stas Baker to somehow convince Freddy that Jane was his sister, even though Freddy was old enough to know that Baker’s wife wasn’t pregnant with her. Somehow he did convince Freddy. Maybe just psychically, Freddy knew Jane was his blood.
“The following year, 1954, I got a telegram from Baker’s brother. There had been a fire at the Baker house. Baker and his wife were dead, but Freddy and Jane had survived. I flew up there. I stayed away from the children, I was too ashamed to see them, but I bribed the child-care officers into placing Freddy and Jane with friends of mine in Los Angeles. I knew the woman, we had had an affair, and her husband was a decent sort, so I knew the children would have a good home. After I had arranged that, I asked around Monterey about Baker and his wife. Somehow I felt guilty about them, too. Then I found out the truth about Stas Baker: that he was a sadist, a bully who tortured his wife mentally and Freddy physically. When I knew him in the 30’s, he was just another mob stooge—a courier runner/sometime accountant. A quiet, decent sort. A man who seemed grieved by the fact that he and his wife couldn’t have children. But I was