“That is not going to happen. She’s fourteen. Have you lost your mind?” Earl yelled.
Earl had spent the past twenty years building a reputation and career of which any man could be proud, and he wasn’t about to let his misguided son mess that up because he had taken a fancy to a young girl. As national chaplain of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, Earl was accountable to the government and to the public, and he was acutely aware that Van’s actions could reflect badly on him.
“Please, Father. I don’t want to live in sin,” Van said, hoping the mention of sin would persuade the reverend.
“Take her home, Van. Now. Before it’s too late,” Earl urged.
“That’s not going to happen. I love her, and I’m going to marry her with or without your help,” Van retorted.
“What happened to you?” Earl said quietly. “You know this is wrong.”
“I love her. What’s so wrong with that?”
“She’s fourteen!” Earl yelled. “That’s what’s wrong with it.”
“As usual, I can count on you,” Van said, knowing the effect his words would have on his father.
“Take her back,” Earl begged, “before you get into more trouble.”
“No. I won’t.”
“Please, son. Nothing good will come of this.”
Van hung up the phone.
“Let’s go grab a bite to eat,” Van told Judy. “I know a place,” he said, ushering her out of the airport and into a taxi.
“What happened?” Judy said when they were on their way.
Van shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Seeing the tears welling in her eyes, he patted her leg. “It’ll be okay. We’ll figure it out.”
After they were seated at Gene & Georgetti, one of Chicago’s finest steakhouses, Judy tried again to get Van to tell her what his father had said, but he ignored her.
“Use this fork for your salad and this one for your entrée,” he said, placing her napkin in her lap. “I’ll order for you. You’ve got to have the beef. There’s only three places in the world where you can get beef of this quality – Chicago, Kansas City, and Kobe, Japan.”
Throughout dinner, Van was quiet, contemplating his next move.
“We’re not going back,” he said. “They can’t take you away from me.”
“Where are we going?” Judy inquired nervously.
Van smiled.
“Mexico. We can get married there.”
Mexico City was everything Van had promised. Judy followed along happily when he dragged her from one market to another, searching for books and documents he could resell, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of a world that was foreign to her. Van seemed quite at home as he skimmed through stacks of paper and scrolls of writing, seeming to understand the hieroglyphs from the precolonial period of Spanish occupation of the great city on the island in the lake.
When he wasn’t working, Van took her to visit the Catedral Metropolitana, on the Zócalo, where Judy watched in awe as a boys’ choir raised their heavenly voices in praise, emitting the most beautiful sounds she had ever heard. And when Van brought her to see the Teotihuacán pyramids, constructed around A.D. 300 just north of Mexico City, my mother thought she had never seen anything so amazing.
“Look at the way they are laid out,” Van said, pointing from one pyramid to the next. “The Aztec people who came later believed that the gods were born here. There’s the Pyramid of the Sun, and look, there’s the Pyramid of the Moon. The Teotihuacáno warriors hunted people, sacrificing them to the gods because they thought the end of the world was coming. They hoped their sacrifices would save them from the earthquakes they feared would kill them all.”
“What happened to them?” Judy asked.
“They just disappeared one day. The whole city. No one really knows why.”
“How do you know this?” Judy asked.
“I know lots of things,” Van said, smiling.
The next morning, Van decided it was time to get married.
“Pack your bags,” he told her. “We’re going to Acapulco. There’s a resort there, the Las Brisas, where they pick you up in pink jeeps and take you around the city. You’ll love it. I know a little church nearby where we can get married.”
Judy, enjoying the adventure of it all, quickly packed the few items of clothing Van had bought her and was soon ready to go.
When they got to Acapulco, Van rushed Judy to the church but was disappointed to learn that he could not marry her without parental consent.
“What do we do now?” Judy asked.
Undeterred, Van said, “We go on our honeymoon.”
Because the Las Brisas was fully booked, they had to settle for a high-rise complex nearby on Acapulco Bay. They spent the next few days acting like they were on their honeymoon – sunning on the beach during the day, making love at night.
On May 11, 1962, a slight shaking stirred Van and Judy from their slumber. It was a little more than the usual early-morning rumble of the city buses, to which they were already accustomed, having lived their lives in San Francisco. As Van reached for his glasses on the nightstand, it happened. A 7.1-magnitude earthquake knocked him off balance. Judy screamed as Van fell onto the floor, and the bed began to move on the rolling tile. Pictures on the walls crashed to the floor. Judy tried to reach Van as the building swayed for what seemed like an eternity but was actually less than a minute.
When it was over, they walked onto their balcony and surveyed the damage. Some of the balconies above them swayed dangerously, hanging on by only a piece of rebar. Van hurried Judy back into the room, lighting a candle so she could see. While Van went out again to assess the damage, Judy cleaned broken glass from the floor.
For the next few days, they were forced to stay at the hotel, because the rubble covering the city’s streets made travel impossible. While Van sorted through the documents he had bought in Mexico City, Judy sat on the beach, gazing at the beautiful bodies of the bronzed young men surfing and playing volleyball. There was nothing else to do. Van, distracted by the thought of Judy being alone at the beach, watched jealously from a window high above.
On May 19, an aftershock with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the city. My father decided it was time to return to the States. He needed no more signs from the gods. He and Judy packed their things and boarded a plane, blissfully unaware that the seed of their undoing had been planted in Mexico.
Shortly after they arrived in Los Angeles, Van became ill and checked into a hospital for treatment. He was diagnosed with infectious hepatitis, a virus that was common in Mexico and frequently spread through the consumption of contaminated food or water.
“I’ll be okay,” he reassured Judy, who sat by his bedside, refusing to leave.
“Do you want me to call your parents?” she said, worrying.
“No. Absolutely not,” he said. “The doctor said I won’t be here long.”
When Van recovered, they headed back to San Francisco and rented an apartment in a five-story building at 585 Geary Street, on the southern slopes of Nob Hill. The one-bedroom apartment featured a big bay window that overlooked the Hotel California, across the street. A fire escape