The Bruners

Weeks after entering the orphanage, he finally received a letter from his parents that read that they were living with his grandparents and that he should imagine every night before he fell asleep they were tucking him into bed and telling him how much they loved him. “We know you don’t understand now what we did,” his parents wrote, “but when you are older, you will and you will thank us.”

Several months later, having received no second letter, he saw the pictures for the first time. They were in Life magazine, shoved in his face by one of the orphanage boys.

In one picture, a bald person—a man or a woman, he couldn’t tell—who looked like a skeleton with skin, had his or her body folded up like a filthy blanket in a space that looked only about two feet high.

In another, a huge pile of sticks lay in a bare room. Or at least what looked like sticks. When he gave the picture a closer look, he saw that they were actually dead bodies.

The magazine said these were prisoners in something called Nazi concentration camps.

“This Hitler your parents liked so much, he put Jewish people in ovens, like bread,” the boy hissed.

“That’s a lie!” he retorted.

“Then where did the pictures come from?”

“I—I don’t know! But I know—this country—it does bad things. It makes people think people are bad who aren’t.”

The boy punched him in the face.

He had nightmares about the pictures, but whenever he would wake up he would see his parents crouched by his bed, stroking his hair, telling him the pictures and stories weren’t true, and then he would fall back into a nice dreamless sleep.

Bobby, as he thought of himself now, waited eagerly, then desperately, for another letter. He would ask Mother Agatha more and more frequently if he had received one. Finally, after four months of this, Mother Agatha explained to him with a trace of grim kindness in her voice that they might have been trapped behind “the wrong side” of the Berlin Wall, the East one, which was run by evil people, the Russians, who enslaved their people and turned them into worker robots.

If his parents had met this fate, he would likely never hear from them again.

Though he told himself he would never believe a witch like her, the longer he didn’t hear from them, the more he did.

By the age of fourteen, Bobby had become Bob. No longer the orphanage whipping boy, he had friends, but ones he always kept at arm’s length. In class one day, his history teacher, Mr. Smith, spoke about the prejudices German immigrants and German-Americans faced during World War I. When he began talking about violence against them being lightly or not punished, Bob became so pale and queasy that Mr. Smith asked him if he needed to go to the nurse’s office.

As the class was filing out, Mr. Smith asked him to stay behind.

“You know my name used to be Schmidt, not Smith,” the teacher confided. He spoke of his childhood as a German immigrant during World War I, living among fellow Germans who would suddenly disappear, hearing whispers about “relocation” camps and being hazed by kids at school for being a “kraut.”

By the end of his story, Bob couldn’t take it anymore and with a quavering voice spit out his own story, including what Mother Agatha had said about his parents and his eventual acceptance that she had probably been right.

“I don’t know if I even want them to be alive anymore. Because if they are . . . if th-they are . . . ” he started crying, “then God knows where they could be—in some terrible work camp. Maybe in something like those concentration camps they say that—”

“That they lie about.” Mr. Smith placed a hand on his shoulder. “You need to know that. A bunch of sick lies cooked up by the Allies to placate its people so they wouldn’t be enraged about all the lives lost in that senseless war. So that if their own terrible deeds in the war were to ever come out, they could say, See, we had to commit these atrocities—look at the evil we were up against. And the Jews, they were all too happy to help disseminate this lie so they could be rewarded for their so-called suffering by being awarded their own country.”

Before Mr. Smith sent him on his way with a note excusing his lateness, he reached into his desk drawer.

“Never be ashamed,” the teacher told him, placing a paperback book in his hand.

He looked down at it. The cover read Mein Kampf.

Mr. Smith got him a job working for his brother-in-law who owned a cattle ranch. Bob loved it, partly because he loved the horses and fresh air, but also because of his relationship with Emmett, a twenty-year-old ranch hand who had taken him under his wing. An orphan himself, Emmett understood what questions not to ask and what expectations not to have.

Emmett took Bob to his first rodeo. The boy immediately fell in love, soon spending much of his earnings on shows and his time daydreaming about becoming a rider himself one day. The following year, Emmett took him to a brothel, where he lost his virginity. Though his first experience was uncomfortable and awkward, when he had time to reflect on it, he realized he liked the idea of having his sexual needs taken care of by a prostitute. It lessened the need for a romantic relationship.

At sixteen, Bob dropped out of school, moved in with Emmett, and started working at the ranch full-time. By then, he was pleased enough with his new life that the Holocaust and Mein Kampf stuff was no more than a faint memory.

It was at this point that he also found a girlfriend, or one of sorts. The black-haired, navy-eyed boy had developed into a ruggedly handsome, tall, strapping youth who looked older than his years. He had caught the eye of the thirty-year-old wife of the ranch’s owner the moment he had arrived at the ranch two years earlier, but she had waited two years to actually pursue him. She didn’t have to put out much effort. Not merely because she was pretty, but because the idea of sleeping with a married woman, particularly regularly, appealed to Bob. Having a married lover was the best of both worlds. He could get some of the affection and intimacy that came with having a girlfriend or wife, as well as the validation of sexual desirability that came with free sex, while remaining free of the burden of the questions and expectations that was the price one normally had to pay to get these things. He predicted quite correctly that there would be more married women in his future, just as he had predicted quite correctly that there would be more prostitutes.

At seventeen, he became a professional rodeo rider and by twenty-two, he had become one of the most successful riders on the circuit. At twenty-three, however, the sport left a fellow rider and friend paralyzed, and Bob started thinking of early retirement. He decided to save up for a ranch and at twenty-five, he bought a cattle ranch outside of Dallas.

Being a rancher turned out to be a lonely life for him, so when at aged twenty-seven, his mousy, plain eighteen-year-old maid, Britta, informed him he had impregnated her, he actually felt a twinge of relief. He had to eventually do the marriage and kids things anyway, didn’t he?

When Britta gave birth to a girl they named Bedelia, however, all of Bob’s ambivalence evaporated. He was immediately smitten and only became more so as the golden-haired child became a true beauty, with a dimpled chin, pool-blue eyes, and peony-pink lips. But after she turned three, she began to be a handful.

She threw tantrums at the drop of a hat, bloody tantrums that left her with a raw, hoarse, near non-existent voice. Tantrums that could be instigated by anything from clothing items whose tags were too scratchy against her skin to a meal she didn’t like to her mother telling her they had to leave for nursery school. The nursery school tantrums were so bad that often it was decided she should just stay home, and eventually she stopped being sent all together. They decided to wait until the next year, and the next year they decided to wait for kindergarten.