I reached a hand toward her. “I’m-”
“Maggie MacGowen,” she said. “Good heavens. You are Maggie MacGowen, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Your program was the only reason I ever watched TV on Monday nights. We’ve shown several of your old PBS films on community nights and had good discussions about the issues. Whatever brings you…” She set aside the book in her hands as her face fell. “Oh. Park.”
“Park,” I said.
“Dear God.”
I told her we were still negotiating with the network, but that even without their backing I wanted to make a film about her former husband.
“It’s still in the development stage,” I said. “I don’t know the direction it will go, except that it will not be a crime report.”’
“But you will talk about his death.”
“Yes. Before he died I was thinking about making the film as an independent. But the manner of his death brought the network aboard.”
“I saw in the paper that you found him. Do you know, was he shot?”
The image of his bashed-in skull flashed behind my eyes: gunshot? I didn’t think so, but I’m no expert. I said, “The coroner hasn’t announced an official cause of death yet.”
“I don’t mean to be morbid, but would you tell me about what you saw?”
Briefly, I did, with no embellishments.
She nodded, gazing off into the ether somewhere. After a moment, she said, “Thank you.”
“Mrs. Holloway, I would like to talk to you on the record.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, gaze drifting back to me.
“On camera.”
“Oh.” Her hand automatically went to the feature she was most worried about having filmed, in her case the looseness below her chin. “When?”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
While she thought that over, I waited. After glancing at the wall clock, she said, “The Senior Center shows a movie before lunch on Monday, so after the schoolkids leave, it’s usually pretty quiet here until the seniors come in for their computer class at one. After that, of course, the older schoolkids are in for Homework Camp. So, if you’ll give me a minute to floof up a bit, now is a good time.”
When she saw my surprise-I had intended to come back later with a film crew-she said, “If we don’t do it now, I’ll get cold feet and say no. And I think I really want to talk about Park.”
“Take all the time you need.”
I had a good camcorder in my bag, as always, and an extra battery pack. I had planned to use it only to shoot footage of Holloway’s home town and his family’s farm, but a conversation with his ex-wife was a bonus.
While Karen Holloway “floofed” I walked around the library testing light levels in various locations, looking for a good place to set up. I found a green overstuffed club chair in the community room and wrestled it into position facing the front windows, with shelves of books as the background and a large whiteboard positioned to bounce reflected light from the windows onto her face. A stool with a stack of books on top served in lieu of a tripod to steady the camera. It was a jury-rigged setup, but I had filmed under worse conditions.
When Karen came back, hair brushed, new powder on her nose and fresh blush on her cheeks-she was very pretty in an English-country-garden sort of way-I positioned her in the chair, took some test footage, ran it back, adjusted the light bounce from the whiteboard, added a desk lamp as a key light behind her head, took another look, and smiled. The slant of the light picked up the blue in her eyes and created a shadow below her chin, the key light set her apart from the background. Because the camcorder had less than great sound pickup, I clipped a mic that fed into a thumb-size digital recorder to the placket of her cardigan, slipped the recorder itself into her pocket, and taped a separate sound recording that my partner, Guido, might need to do some magic with to sync with the film.
When we were settled in, with the camera set so that she had to turn her head just slightly to the right, toward the mic, to look at me, I asked her to tell me about Park Holloway.
After a few nervous minutes, she seemed to forget about the camera and spoke with an easy confidence, grateful, I thought, to have the opportunity to tell her part of Park Holloway’s story.
“Park and I started dating in high school. I was the head cheerleader and he was the absolute class nerd: valedictorian, president of the chess and debate clubs, our delegate to the Future Farmers of America convention in Sacramento, or as he referred to the capital, ‘Sack a’ tomatoes.’ I was crazy about him. God, what a sense of humor.
“Somewhere, he got the idea he needed to go to Harvard. Around here, the really bright kids go to Stanford or Cal. But Park knew he was going to Harvard; he had to show me on a map where it was. He got the FFA scholarship and a National Merit scholarship, and by God, he went to Harvard.”
With an abashed lift of her shoulder, she said, “I got a B.A. in Elementary Education from Sac State. Happy with a B-average. Park graduated summa cum laude.”
She told me they got married the summer after they graduated. They made a bargain: she would go with him back to Massachusetts and get a teaching job to support them while he finished graduate school. When he finished, he would find a job and she would get a master’s in school administration or library science, and they would start a family.
“But the best-laid plans, huh?” she said with a soft smile. “When Park was working on his dissertation about Chinese trade, we went to live in China. It was wonderful. China was just emerging into western commerce, and it was so exciting to be there at the beginning. The Chinese people are so enterprising-if you ever want to write a treatise on adaptation for survival, talk to the people of China-I still marvel.”
She paused, seemed to think something over before she spoke. “Now, this just may not sound politically correct, and I know there are two sides to the issue, but I’ll say it anyway.”
Looking directly at the camera, she said, “Park and I were in Murano, the glassmakers’ island near Venice, Italy. The staff of the glassware shops would not let Chinese people with cameras enter their shops. I was outraged, and said so to Park. But he said it was just smart business to bar them. He said the Chinese would take pictures of the beautiful handmade glassware-a single wineglass will cost hundreds of dollars-go home and find a way to produce it for under twenty bucks, then flood the market. And I’ll be darned if on my last visit to Chinatown in San Francisco there weren’t shops full of ‘Murano’ glass, but at prices too cheap to be the real thing.”
After Holloway completed his dissertation, he received a fellowship from the London School of Economics to continue his research, and they went back to China, she told me.
Some of the businesses that Holloway had worked with during his research formed an agricultural trade consortium. They hired him to represent their interests in Washington, so the young Holloways set up housekeeping near the Capitol.
“I enjoyed Washington at first; there were so many young couples like us. But I rarely saw Park-back and forth to China, meetings all over the world; I was at home with two babies.
“So when the congressman from our home district died suddenly and Park was asked to fill the position until the next election, I encouraged him to accept. I thought we’d see more of him. But I was wrong; we saw him less.”
She said that something happened to Park when he entered politics. His drive and intellectual curiosity morphed into raw ambition.
“The egos in Washington,” Karen said with disdain. “I found them all unbearable. I didn’t want to raise my children in that environment, so I brought them home.”
I asked her, “When does Hiram Chin enter the picture?”
“Hiram?” The question seemed to surprise her. “The two of them worked on a Smithsonian committee together and just hit it off right away. Hiram had that cosmopolitan polish that Park, raised on a farm, wished would rub off on him. It’s interesting; Hiram was as fascinated by European culture as Park was with Chinese culture. Intellectually, they were about evenly matched. They became great friends, got involved in all sorts of interesting projects together.”