The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick Read Free Book Online Page A

and glittery life. One day at H. G. Wells’s house, when she was six, Zita was told to prepare for a special treat.
    “Zita, I’d like you to meet Charlie Chaplin.”
    A small, nondescript man drew near. Zita burst into fits of weeping. “He’s
not
Charlie Chaplin.” The stranger retreated. And then, a few minutes later, this time wearing a bowler hat and twirling a cane, around the corner came the great man himself.
    Even today, at eighty-seven, Zita retains the manner of a precocious child blurting out naughty and “forbidden” remarks, secure in the knowledge that she is too adorable to be rebuked. She is a formidable storyteller who basks in the spotlight. She tells of swimming in the Mediterranean sixty years ago with Didi Dumas, a handsome young Frenchman who was testing an underwater breathing device that he was working on with another young man, named Cousteau. She tells war stories—about her arrest (on trumped-up charges) for running guns to Greece, the jail cell she was thrown in, her escape on foot across France. She tells of a beau’s death in the war in a plane crash (this was before Charley’s father), “the great tragedy of my life.”
    Charley Hill was raised on such gripping and harrowing tales, though his own childhood was more prosaic. His father, Landon Hill, was an Air Force officer who later switched over to the National Security Agency. Zita spent her married life dragging her family from one dreary assignment to another. “Dayton, Ohio,” she sighs theatrically. “Oh, it was absolutely dreadful.”
    Charley, perpetually the new kid in town, attended perhaps a dozen schools in all, in Texas and London and Colorado and Frankfurt, Germany, and Washington, D.C. (Decades later, he still recalls the name of the bully who beat him up when he showed up in San Antonio, age seven, fresh from England, chirping away in a funny accent and decked out in wool hat, long socks, and short pants.) Growing up became one long exercise in sizing up new acquaintances and learning how to fit in with the locals.
    Charley is proud of his mismatched ancestry, “log cabin on one side and knight of the realm on the other.” He prizes a collection of ancient family photos that show his American forebears standing proudly in front of a rude cabin in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. Better yet, in Hill’s eyes, a great-great-grandmother on his father’s side was a full-blooded Cherokee, so he can claim
both
cowboy and Indian ancestors. The connection always sets Hill to computing just what fraction Indian he is himself, but he is deeply non-numeric and the answer never comes out the same way twice in a row.
    Landon Hill’s story was markedly less cheery. He emerged from World War II physically unharmed but psychically scarred. He had been one of the first American soldiers at Dachau, for instance, and the scenes he witnessed there—Landon supervised the unloading of railroad cars crammed with dead bodies—haunted him for the rest of his life. “One of those really bright people who couldn’t cope with life,” in Charley’s view, the war hero became an alcoholic. On a December day in 1966, drunk, he stepped out of a taxicab in Washington’s Dupont Circle and slammed the door on his coat. The taxi sped off and dragged him to his death.
    Half a year later, Charley Hill volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He likes to boast that he comes from a long line of soldiers, and it doesn’t take much coaxing to start him reciting the roll. The list begins with his father, and, if he includes ancestors on both sides of his family, stretches back through the War of 1812 and the French and Indian Wars. Earlier than that, the trail is murky, but the first of Hill’s soldier forebears fought in a border skirmish in Scotland around 1400 and even made a cameo in “The Ballad of Chevy Chase.” Charley quotes the lines with glee: “and good Squire Widdrington, though in woeful dumps, for when his legs were smitten off, he fought