Emmett tapped my knee, man-to-man empathy. “Georgie’s father was Redmond Tilden, quite a celebrated doctor in Scotland. He was an anatomist. The Kirk was still strong in Aberdeen back then, and Doc Redmond could only legally dissect the corpses of executed criminals and the child molesters the villagers caught and stoned. Georgie liked to touch the organs his dad threw out. I heard a tale when we were boys, and I credit it. It seems that Doc Redmond bought a stiff from some body snatchers. He cut into the heart, and it was still beating. Georgie saw it, and it thrilled him. I credit the tale because in the Argonne Georgie used to take his bayonet to the dead Jerries. I’m not sure, but I think he’s burgled graves here in America. Scalps and inside organs. Ghastly, all of it.”
I saw an opening, a stab in the dark that might hit home. Jane Chambers had mentioned Georgie and Ramona filming pageants that centered on Emmett’s World War I adventures, and two years ago at dinner, Ramona had said something about “Reenacting episodes out of Mr. Sprague’s past he would rather forget.” I swung out with my hunch: “How could you put up with someone so crazy?”
Emmett said, “You’ve been idolized in your time, lad. You know how it is when a weak man needs you to look after him. It’s a special bond, like having a daft little brother.”
I said, “I had a daft big brother once. I looked up to him.”
Emmett laughed–fraudulently. “That’s a side of the fence I’ve never been on.”
“Oh yeah? Eldridge Chambers says otherwise. He left a brief with the City Council before he died. It seems that he witnessed some of Ramona and Georgie’s pageants back in the thirties. Little girls with soldier kilts and toy muskets, Georgie holding off the Germans, you turning tail and running like a goddamn chickenshit coward.”
Emmett flushed and tried to dredge up a smirk; his mouth twitched spastically with the effort. I shouted, “Coward!” and slapped him full force–and the hardcase Scotchman son of a bitch sobbed like a child. Madeleine came out of the bathroom, fresh makeup, clean clothes. She moved to the bed and embraced her “Daddy,” holding him the way he’d held her just a few minutes before.
I said, “Tell me, Emmett.”
The man wept on the shoulder of his ersatz daughter; she stroked him with ten times more tenderness than she’d ever given me. Finally he got out a shell-shocked whisper: “I couldn’t let Georgie go because he saved my life. We got separated from our company, all alone in a big field of stiffs. A German patrol was reconnoitering, sticking bayonets in everything British, dead or alive. Georgie piled Germans on top of us. They were all in pieces from a mortar attack. Georgie made me crawl under all these arms and legs and guts and stay there, and when it was over he cleaned me up and talked about America to cheer me up. So you see I couldn’t . . .”
Emmett’s whisper died out. Madeleine caressed his shoulders, ruffled his hair. I said, “I know that the stag film with Betty and Linda Martin wasn’t shot in TJ. Did Georgie have anything to do with it?”
Madeleine’s voice had the timbre Emmet’s had earlier, when he was the one holding up the front. “No. Linda and I were talking at La Verne’s Hideaway. She told me she needed a place to make a little movie. I knew what she meant, and I wanted to be with Betty again, so I let them use one of my daddy’s vacant houses, one that had an old set in the living room. Betty and Linda and Duke Wellington shot the movie, and Georgie saw them doing it. He was always sneaking around Daddy’s empty houses, and he got crazy over Betty. Probably because she looked like me . . . his daughter.”
I turned away to make it easier for her to spill the rest. “Then?”
“Then, around Thanksgiving, Georgie came to Daddy and said, ‘Give me that girl.’ He said he’d tell the whole world that Daddy wasn’t my daddy, and he’d lie about what we did together, like it was incest. I looked around for Betty, but I couldn’t find her. Later I found out she was in San Diego then. Daddy was letting Georgie stay in the garage, because he was making more and more demands. He gave him money to keep him quiet, but he was still acting nasty and awful.