Bosch had no photographs of his own father. He had told Sylvia that he hadn’t known him, but that had been only partially true. He had grown up not knowing and not, at least outwardly, caring who he was. But when he returned from the war he came back with a sense of urgency to know about his origins. It led him to seek out his father after twenty years of not even knowing his name.
Harry had been raised in a series of youth shelters and foster homes after authorities took him from his mother’s custody. In the dormitories at McClaren or San Fernando or the other halls, he was comforted by his mother’s steady visits, except during the times she was in jail. She told him they couldn’t send him to a foster home without her consent. She had a good lawyer, she said, trying to get him back.
On the day the housemother at McClaren told him the visits were over because his mother was dead, he took the news unlike most boys of eleven. Outwardly, he showed nothing. He nodded that he understood and then walked away. But that day during the swimming period, he dove to the bottom of the deep end and screamed so loud and long that he was sure the noise was breaking through the surface and would draw the attention of the lifeguard. After each breath on top, he would go back down. He screamed and cried until he was so exhausted he could only cling to the pool’s ladder, its cold steel tubes the arms that comforted him. Somehow he wished he could have been there. That was all. He somehow wanted to have protected her.
He was termed ATA after that. Available to Adopt. He began to move through a procession of foster homes where he was made to feel as though he was on tryout. When expectations were not met, it was on to the next house and the next pair of judges. He was once sent back to McClaren because of his habit of eating with his mouth open. And once before he was sent to a home in the Valley, the Choosers, as they were called by the ATAs, took Harry and several other thirteen-year-olds out to the rec field to throw a baseball around. Harry was the one chosen. He soon realized it was not because he exhibited the sterling virtues of boyhood. It was because the man had been looking for a lefthander. His plan was to develop a pitcher and lefthanders were the premium. After two months of daily workouts, pitching lessons and oral education on pitching strategies, Harry ran away from the home. It was six weeks before the cops later picked him up on Hollywood Boulevard. He was sent back to McClaren to await the next set of Choosers. You always had to stand up straight and smile when the Choosers came through the dorm.
He began his search for his father at the county recorder’s office. The 1950 birth records of Hieronymus Bosch at Queen of Angels Hospital listed his mother as Margerie Philips Lowe and his father’s name as his own: Hieronymus Bosch. But Harry, of course, knew this was not the case. His mother had once told him he was the namesake of an artist whose work she admired. She said the painter’s five-hundred-year-old paintings were apt portraits of present L.A., a nightmarish landscape of predators and victims. She told him she would tell him his true father’s name when the time was right. She was found dead in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard before that time came.
Harry hired a lawyer to petition the presiding judge of the juvenile dependency court to allow him to examine his own custody records. The request was granted and Bosch spent several days in the county Hall of Records archive. The voluminous documents given to him chronicled the unsuccessful lengths his mother had gone to keep custody of him. Bosch found it spiritually reassuring, but nowhere in the files was the name of the father. Bosch was at a dead end but wrote down the name of the lawyer who had filed all the papers in his mother’s quest. J. Michael Haller. In writing it down, Bosch realized he knew the name. Mickey Haller had been one of L.A.’s premier criminal defense attorneys. He had handled one of the Manson girls. In the late fifties he had won an acquittal for the so-called Highwayman, a highway patrol officer accused of raping seven women he had stopped for speeding on lonely stretches of the Golden State. What was J. Michael Haller doing on a child custody case?
On nothing more than a hunch, Bosch went to the Criminal Courts Building and ordered all of his mother’s cases from archives. In sorting through them, he found that in addition to the custody battle Haller had represented Margerie P. Lowe on six loitering arrests between 1948 and 1961. That was well into Haller’s time as a top trial lawyer.
In his gut, Harry knew then.
The receptionist in the five-name law office on the top floor of a Pershing Square tower told Bosch that Haller had retired recently because of a medical condition. The phone book didn’t list his residence but the roll of registered voters did. Haller was a Democrat and he lived on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. Bosch would always remember the rosebushes that lined the walkway to his father’s mansion. They were perfect roses.
The maid who answered the door said Mr. Haller was not seeing visitors. Bosch told the woman to tell Mr. Haller it was Margerie Lowe’s son come to pay his respects. Ten minutes later he was led past members of the lawyer’s family. All of them standing in the hallway with strange looks on their faces. The old man had told them to leave his room and send Bosch in alone. Standing at the bedside, Harry figured him for maybe ninety pounds now, and he didn’t need to ask what was wrong because he could tell cancer was eating away at him from the inside out.
“I guess I know why you’ve come,” he rasped.
“I just wanted to… I don’t know.”
He stood there in silence for quite a time, watching how it wore the man out just to keep his eyes open. There was a tube from a box on the bedside that ran under the covers. The box beeped every once in a while as it pumped pain-killing morphine into the dying man’s blood. The old man studied him silently.
“I don’t want anything from you,” Bosch finally said. “I don’t know, I think I just wanted to let you know I made it by okay. I’m all right. In case you ever worried.”
“You have been to the war?”
“Yes. I’m done with that.”
“My son-my other son, he… I kept him away from that… What will you do now?”
“I don’t know.”
After some more silence the old man seemed to nod. He said, “You are called Harry. Your mother told me that. She told me a lot about you… But I could never… Do you understand? Different times. And after it went by so long, I couldn’t… I couldn’t reverse things.”
Bosch just nodded. He hadn’t come to cause the man any more pain. More silence passed and he heard the labored breathing.
“Harry Haller,” the old man whispered then, a broken smile on the thin, peeling lips burned by chemotherapy. “That could have been you. Did you ever read Hesse?”
Bosch didn’t understand but nodded again. There was a beep sound. He watched for a minute until the dosage seemed to take some effect. The old man’s eyes closed and he sighed.
“I better get going,” Harry said. “You take care.”
He touched the man’s frail, bluish hand. It gripped his fingers tightly, almost desperately, and then let go. As he stepped to the door, he heard the old man’s rasp.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I said I did. I did worry about you.”
There was a tear running down the side of the old man’s face, into his white hair. Bosch nodded again and two weeks later he stood on a hill above the Good Shepherd section at Forest Lawn and watched them put the father he never knew in the ground. During the ceremony, he saw a grouping that he suspected was his half brother and three half sisters. The half brother, probably born a few years ahead of Bosch, was watching Harry during the ceremony. At the end, Bosch turned and walked away.