I got sick my first year teach­ing high school. I was tired and weak. Acid turned my stom­ach inside out. I heaved up yel­low stuff. I tried to wait it out, hop­ing I’d get well, but my con­di­tion only grew worse so I final­ly went to a doc­tor and sum­ma­rized my symp­toms. “I’m real­ly sick,” I told him. “I must have can­cer or something.”

“How long have you felt this way?”

“Since the begin­ning of the school year.”

He paused. “Tell me about teaching.”

I told the doc­tor I taught five class­es, three peri­ods of twelfth grade Eng­lish Lit, one of Com­po­si­tion, and one class of kids repeat­ing ninth grade Eng­lish because they failed it last year, thir­ty to forty kids in each class, all of whom wished like hell they were any­where else. To hold their atten­tion, I had to cre­ate three enter­tain­ing tele­vi­sion pro­grams per day, fif­teen per week, and as the star of the show, I had to deliv­er a good per­for­mance. If one of my shows fell flat, I’d lose con­trol of that class and any­thing could, and usu­al­ly did, happen.

I told him this was the first year of full racial inte­gra­tion in Vir­ginia pub­lic schools. Ten­sions ran high. In my class­es, the black kids sat on one side of the room, the whites on the oth­er. It nev­er var­ied. Noth­ing was too insignif­i­cant to pitch the school into tur­moil. Take the elec­tion of the home­com­ing queen. The stu­dent coun­cil made a mis­take in the bal­lot­ing that result­ed in an all-white court. When they dis­cov­ered their mis­take, they decid­ed that plans for the home­com­ing were too far along to fix it. This near­ly caused a riot. Being naive and stu­pid, I had vol­un­teered to be a teacher-spon­sor for the coun­cil. I forced them to fix the mis­take and con­duct a sec­ond elec­tion. A black girl made it into the court on the re-vote, defus­ing the bomb, but the par­ents of the white girl, who got bumped out the sec­ond time around, and some oth­ers, were under­stand­ably angry at me and voiced their com­plaints to the school.

“And there was Fred,” I said. At nine­teen, he was the old­est ninth grad­er in the school. Short and chunky, he combed his hair like Elvis Pres­ley, wore a black leather jack­et, and always sat in the back row. One day I slogged through a chap­ter of Silas Marn­er. The bell final­ly rang, and all the kids filed out of the room except a lit­tle guy named Lanny.

“Mis­ter Oder, didn’t you see?” Lan­ny said, his eyes wide. “Fred had a gun.”

“What?!!!!”

“Fred was play­ing with a gun and smil­ing that weird smile of his the whole class. Didn’t you see?”

“No. I didn’t see.”

I ran to the principal’s office. We sum­moned Fred. He freely admit­ted he had a gun in my class. “I didn’t mean no harm. I just brought it along in case one of em got outa line.”

We sus­pend­ed him for a week. I thought I was get­ting to him before this hap­pened. He paid atten­tion and seemed to be try­ing, but when he returned, he wouldn’t talk to me. A few weeks lat­er, he dropped out of school. I couldn’t shake the feel­ing that I’d failed him.

“And there’s Ruth!” She was a senior in Eng­lish Lit, short, slim, and perky with a cute smile. She slaved over her papers and stud­ied hard.

Then one day her smile went away; she stopped pay­ing atten­tion; and some­times tears came to her eyes. I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t open up.

One morn­ing before class she asked me to sign a doc­u­ment. In Vir­ginia, tru­an­cy was a crim­i­nal mis­de­meanor for chil­dren eigh­teen and under. This doc­u­ment seemed to say she could quit school if her teach­ers excused her absences.

“I don’t under­stand,” I said. “Why do you want to quit? You’ll grad­u­ate in June. If you drop out, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

Tears welled in her eyes. She showed me where two teach­ers had already signed. “Please, Mis­ter Oder.”

“Tell me why you want to quit.”

“I can’t. Please just sign it, Mis­ter Oder. Please!”

I refused to sign unless she told me what was going on.

She burst into tears and ran away. I went after her, but couldn’t find her.

She missed school for a week. I should have called her par­ents, but I allowed my tele­vi­sion shows to take pri­or­i­ty and I let it go. When she returned, she was a dif­fer­ent per­son, somber and list­less, and she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.

A few weeks lat­er, I learned from a teacher close to Ruth’s fam­i­ly that she’d tak­en the time off to have an abor­tion. It took my breath away. Ruth was in the throes of the cri­sis of her life, and I missed it.

I told the doc­tor about the boy who had a seizure right in front of me in the court­yard. “I had no idea what to do.” And about the giant kid in the hall­way out­side my class­room, who threat­ened me when I told him to qui­et down. “If my stu­dents hadn’t stepped in, I don’t know what would have hap­pened.” And on and on.

When I paused to take a breath, the doc­tor broke in. “I’ve got good news. You don’t have can­cer,” he said. “You’re hav­ing a ner­vous breakdown.”

He pre­scribed lit­tle white pills. I took them for five days. I’d nev­er been hap­pi­er in my life. On the sixth day, I flushed the rest of them down the toi­let. I fig­ured I’d nev­er be able to quit if I kept tak­ing them. Five days turned out to be enough. The break from my cycle of stress and depres­sion put me in a much bet­ter place.

I was twen­ty-two years old that first year and too imma­ture to be a good teacher, but I grew into that job. Some­where along the line, I fig­ured out that teach­ing was not about my tele­vi­sion shows. It was about the stu­dents. I did bet­ter from there on.

I didn’t stay with it, though. Teacher’s pay start­ed out low and ramped up very slow­ly. My wife was a teacher, too, but even on dou­ble pay we wor­ried we couldn’t sup­port a fam­i­ly. We talked it through and decid­ed I’d apply to law school.

Short­ly after I mailed out my appli­ca­tions, the prin­ci­pal called me to the audi­to­ri­um over the P.A. sys­tem. I walked in to find my stu­dents assem­bled there. They ush­ered me to the front of the room and one of them read aloud their ded­i­ca­tion of the year­book to me. I’m a lit­tle blur­ry about what I said to them. All I remem­ber is strug­gling to keep it togeth­er. I hope I con­veyed how much it meant to me.

The fol­low­ing spring, I was accept­ed to law school, and with more than a lit­tle reluc­tance, I gave the coun­ty notice of my intent to resign at the end of the school year.

This deci­sion worked out well for us, but I still have my doubts. I taught for three years. Over four hun­dred stu­dents sat in my class­es. They’re in their six­ties now, and I don’t know where they are or how they fared in life. Teach­ing them was the hard­est job I ever had. I made a lot of mis­takes, but I was get­ting the hang of it when I walked away. In rare moments, I broke through and made a dif­fer­ence. Those moments were each a great gift, and because of them, forty-five years lat­er, I some­times still dream about the road not taken.

In Feb­ru­ary, 2014, the doc­tors told Kent Haruf, the author of the best­selling Plain­song series, that he had inter­sti­tial lung can­cer. They said it was incur­able and he would die soon. It hit him hard, as you’d expect, and for a while, he couldn’t find his way for­ward, but by April, he was tired of wait­ing around to die. He need­ed some­thing to do. He’d been a writer all his life, so he tried to write. He strug­gled with a few short sto­ries, but they didn’t seem to come togeth­er. Then it hit him. He told his wife, Cathy, “I’m going to write our sto­ry.” Some­how in the short time he had left, under the dark shad­ow of the grim reaper’s scythe, he man­aged to write a mas­ter­piece, his last novel.

Our Souls at Night is a love sto­ry. Addie and Louis are in their sev­en­ties. Both have been recent­ly wid­owed. They bare­ly know each oth­er, but one day out of the blue, Addie comes knock­ing at Louis’s door and makes a propo­si­tion. She asks him to come to her house at bed time to sleep with her. This isn’t about sex, she explains. She wants him to lie beside her in bed and talk with her before they go to sleep. That’s it. Noth­ing more.

Louis is star­tled. He finds her pro­pos­al bold and strange, but after he thinks about it, he real­izes he’s lone­ly and hasn’t got much else to do any­way, so he fig­ures, “What the hell?”

That night, he packs a lit­tle bag with his paja­mas, tooth­brush, and shav­ing kit. He walks down the street to her house after dark and returns home ear­ly the next morn­ing so the neigh­bors won’t notice and be scan­dal­ized. He returns the next night. And the next. While Addie and Louis lay side by side in their bed clothes night after night, they tell each oth­er about their lives, the good times and the bad, and a beau­ti­ful love sto­ry, mag­i­cal and won­drous, spins out from there.

Our Souls at Night was inspired by Haruf’s rela­tion­ship with his wife, Cathy. They knew each oth­er in high school, but they’d nev­er dat­ed. After high school, they went in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, and their lives marched on apart from one anoth­er. They got mar­ried; they raised kids; and their mar­riages end­ed in divorce. Not hav­ing thought about one anoth­er for decades, they attend­ed their thir­ti­eth high school class reunion. They struck up a con­ver­sa­tion and dis­cov­ered they had reached sim­i­lar places in their lives. In the months that fol­lowed, they fell in love and got mar­ried, a “late-life gift,” Haruf called it.

He start­ed to write their love sto­ry on May 1, 2014. He retired each morn­ing to the pre­fab­ri­cat­ed shed behind his house where he always did his writ­ing, only this time he was teth­ered to an oxy­gen tank. Through­out his career and in this case, he used what has to be the most unusu­al writ­ing method ever employed. He put on a wool stock­ing cap, pulled it down over his eyes, and tapped out his first drafts blind on an old Roy­al upright type­writer. He did this to shut out the real world so he could dream his way into the land­scape and com­mu­ni­ty of Holt, Col­orado, the fic­tion­al high-plains small town where his sto­ries take place. After he com­plet­ed a chap­ter typ­ing blind, he took off the cap, reviewed the raw text with all its typos and mis­takes, made notes of changes in the mar­gins, and then typed a clean revision.

On aver­age, it had tak­en him six years to write one of his pre­vi­ous nov­els, but this time his dead­line was clos­ing fast and unfor­giv­ing, so in writ­ing this last nov­el, he set a goal of fin­ish­ing a chap­ter a day. And mirac­u­lous­ly, he did it. In forty-five days he wrote forty-five chap­ters, and then began to revise and pol­ish them.

In mid-August when Cathy began tran­scrib­ing his drafts onto her com­put­er, she must have sensed that this nov­el was some­thing spe­cial. “Don’t you dare die before you fin­ish it,” she told him.

In Sep­tem­ber, Haruf sent a com­plete man­u­script to his edi­tor, Gary Fisketjon, with a cov­er note: “Dear Gary, Here’s a lit­tle sur­prise. Love, Kent.” Giv­en Haruf’s con­di­tion, Fisketjon was indeed great­ly surprised.

He pushed every­thing else on his desk aside because he knew there couldn’t be much time left for the back-and-forth of edit­ing. Fisketjon and Haruf worked hard on it for the next sev­er­al weeks. In mid-Novem­ber, Haruf’s strength waned. He told Cathy she would have to do the final copyedit.

Like Addie and Louis, Cathy and Kent liked to end the day talk­ing to each oth­er in bed. The night of Novem­ber 29, they went to bed and talked into the night. In the morn­ing, he was gone.

Cathy fin­ished the copy­ed­it two days later.

Our Souls at Night was pub­lished in May, 2015. I spent most of 2013 and 2014 writ­ing Old Wounds to the Heart. I want­ed to write a love sto­ry about peo­ple in their sev­en­ties and eight­ies.  Before I start­ed writ­ing, I searched for sim­i­lar sto­ries. I found noth­ing inspir­ing, and it both­ered me. The unstat­ed assump­tion seemed to be that the elder­ly aren’t capa­ble of, or for rea­sons of pro­pri­ety shouldn’t indulge in, love and pas­sion. I didn’t like that, so I set out to write a sto­ry about old peo­ple who are vital and alive in every way.

Old Wounds to the Heart is about a love tri­an­gle among peo­ple in their late sev­en­ties. When the sto­ry opens, two of them are sui­ci­dal and the oth­er is iso­lat­ed and depressed. An ancient secret of betray­al comes out and their lives clash togeth­er in a storm of emo­tions – rage, jeal­ousy, hate, love, lust, pas­sion, and hope. One day they’re stand­ing around, wait­ing to die. The next, they’re wag­ing a pitched bat­tle for every breath of life left in them.

I pub­lished Old Wounds to the Heart in July, 2015. I found Our Souls at Night a month lat­er. The Fates were kind to me in the tim­ing. I’m not sure I would have writ­ten my sto­ry if I’d seen Haruf’s last nov­el before­hand. It says so much of what I want­ed to say, but with so much more grace and elegance.

Although writ­ten by a writer on death’s doorstep, Our Souls at Night is a cel­e­bra­tion of life, and the sto­ry behind its cre­ation mir­rors its theme. Faced with the cer­tain­ty of a swift­ly approach­ing death, Haruf did what he loved to do to the very end, ced­ing every inch of ground to mor­tal­i­ty only grudg­ing­ly and on his own terms. What a way to go out, and what a great gift to leave behind.

From 1982 to 1985, Christo­pher Mount­bat­ten Chich­ester rent­ed a guest house from Ruth Sohus on Lor­raine Road in San Mari­no. I lived only a cou­ple blocks away and Chich­ester vis­it­ed my neigh­bor across the street many times, but I can only recall meet­ing him once. He sat in the chair at the bar­ber shop, get­ting his hair cut, while I wait­ed my turn. He was in his twen­ties, short and slight, and he spoke with an aris­to­crat­ic accent. I didn’t pay much atten­tion to him because I didn’t real­ize what a big deal he was.

He was British, a descen­dant of Sir Frances Chich­ester, the first per­son to sail around the world alone, and he was a nephew of Lord Mount­bat­ten, one of the Three Supreme Allied Com­man­ders in
World War II. Chichester’s busi­ness card pro­claimed his roy­al her­itage: “Christo­pher Chich­ester, XIII Bt (13th baronet), San Mari­no, CA.” It sport­ed his fam­i­ly crest, an egret with wings spread and an eel in its mouth, over the mot­to, “Firm en Foi” (firm in faith). He was a San Mari­no Rotar­i­an and a mem­ber of the City Club; he hob­nobbed with civic lead­ers; and he pro­duced a tele­vi­sion pro­gram on a pub­lic access chan­nel enti­tled, “Inside San Mari­no.” He attend­ed USC, work­ing on his M.F.A. in Film Stud­ies, and he was well-con­nect­ed in the enter­tain­ment indus­try. He pro­duced the movie, The Pris­on­er, and he secured pass­es for his friends to par­ties host­ed by Stephen Spiel­berg and George Lucas.

While Chich­ester lived in Ruth Sohus’s guest house, her son, John, and his wife, Lin­da, moved into the main house with her and befriend­ed Chich­ester. Sud­den­ly in 1985, they left San Mari­no. Chich­ester told Ruth they had gone to France to work on a clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment project. About a month after they left town, one of Chichester’s rel­a­tives died, and he had to return to Lon­don to take care of the estate.

Months passed, and Ruth heard noth­ing from her son, so she filed a miss­ing person’s report. The police couldn’t locate John or Lin­da. They want­ed to talk to Chich­ester, but sur­pris­ing­ly they couldn’t find any record of any­one with that name and back­ground. Strange­ly, fin­ger­prints lift­ed from the guest house matched some­one named Chris­t­ian Ger­hart­sre­it­er, a Ger­man immi­grant, but they couldn’t find this man either.

Time passed with no word about the miss­ing per­sons. Ruth Sohus died in 1988 and her house was sold. That year some­one named Christo­pher Crowe tried to sell a Toy­ota pick­up in Con­necti­cut. The buy­er became sus­pi­cious because the name on the title was John Sohus. He called the police. They set up a sting, but Crowe didn’t show up.
In 1994, nine years after Chich­ester left San Mari­no, my wife and I were dri­ving down Lor­raine Road on the way to our house when we came upon scores of police cars in front of the old Sohus house. A police­man stopped us. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Active crime scene. You’ll have to leave the area, sir.”

We were stunned. San Marino’s idea of a crime is park­ing your car on the street overnight in front of your own house. I’d nev­er heard the words “active crime scene” used in the same sen­tence with “San Marino.”

The sor­did details ripped through the rumor mill faster than we could get home. When the own­ers of the Sohus house start­ed to dig a pool in the back yard, a back­hoe unearthed three plas­tic bags filled with human bones. Foren­sic analy­sis revealed that some­one blud­geoned a man’s skull with a blunt object, cut his body into three seg­ments, and buried the parts in plas­tic bags. The police sus­pect­ed the bones belonged to John Sohus, but they couldn’t estab­lish a DNA match to a rel­a­tive because he was adopted.

The case gar­nered nation­al press cov­er­age, cul­mi­nat­ing in an episode on the tele­vi­sion pro­gram, Unsolved Mys­ter­ies, ask­ing peo­ple to call in tips about the mys­te­ri­ous Ger­hart­sre­it­er. No one called.

The next year, in 1995, Clark Rock­e­feller mar­ried San­dra Boss in Boston. They were an impres­sive cou­ple. He descend­ed from the Per­cy Rock­e­feller branch of the fam­i­ly. A Yale grad­u­ate, he con­sult­ed with third world coun­tries about debt financ­ing. She was a grad­u­ate of Stan­ford and Har­vard Busi­ness School and the youngest woman ever elect­ed a direc­tor at McK­in­sey and Com­pa­ny. Clark’s mon­ey was tied up in fam­i­ly trusts and all his work was pro bono, so the cou­ple lived on her sev­en fig­ure salary.

Their daugh­ter, Reigh (Clark called her Snooks), was born in 2001. Clark loved Snooks dear­ly, but mar­i­tal strife threat­ened their spe­cial bond when San­dra filed for divorce in 2006. After a bit­ter bat­tle, the court gave her cus­tody of Snooks and restrict­ed Clark to three eight-hour super­vised vis­its per year.  His friends say the sep­a­ra­tion ripped him apart. For two years he endured the restric­tions, but in 2008 he snapped and kid­napped Snooks.

After a nation­wide man­hunt, the police found Clark in Bal­ti­more, liv­ing as Chip Smith with his daugh­ter, Muffy. In the run-up to Clark’s tri­al for kid­nap­ping, the FBI matched his fin­ger­prints to Ger­hart­sre­it­er, and San Mari­no res­i­dents iden­ti­fied the man splashed all over the nation­al press as our Christo­pher Chichester.

The court in Boston sen­tenced him to five years for kid­nap­ping and then flew him to LA to stand tri­al for Sohus’s mur­der. The case against him rest­ed entire­ly on cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence: traces of blood in the guest house; a Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin logo on one of the bags con­tain­ing the bones; a USC emblem on anoth­er bag; and Gerhartsreiter’s attempt to sell Sohus’s truck, using the alias Christo­pher Crowe. The jury found him guilty, and the judge gave him 27 years to life. Today, he sits in Iron­wood State Prison in Blythe, California.

To date, no one has seen or heard from Lin­da Sohus, and the police have found no trace of her.

As with Anna Ander­son, who claimed to be a Russ­ian princess and was the sub­ject of my blog post The Grand Duchess of Char­lottesville, the truth about Ger­hart­sre­it­er is almost more aston­ish­ing than the fraud. He came from a back­woods vil­lage in the Bavar­i­an Alps. His father was a house painter; his moth­er a seam­stress. When he was sev­en­teen, he lied on an appli­ca­tion for a U.S. tourist visa, say­ing a fam­i­ly invit­ed him to stay with them. He land­ed in Con­necti­cut in 1978 and con­vinced a host fam­i­ly he was a high school for­eign exchange stu­dent. They said he learned to speak flaw­less Eng­lish with an aris­to­crat­ic accent by watch­ing episodes of Gilligan’s Island on tele­vi­sion and mim­ic­k­ing the speech pat­terns of Thurston How­ell III, the ascot-wear­ing mil­lion­aire. He nev­er grad­u­at­ed from high school, but some­how gained admis­sion to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, where he attend­ed two quar­ters of col­lege. On the verge of depor­ta­tion in 1981, he mar­ried a woman he did not know in order to get a green card, and prompt­ly left her for Cal­i­for­nia. At the age of 20, he sur­faced in San Mari­no as Christo­pher Chich­ester and showed up in film stud­ies class­es at USC. Fac­ul­ty mem­bers and stu­dents assumed he was a stu­dent, but he nev­er enrolled.

Every­thing he said about him­self in San Mari­no was a lie, and using that plat­form, he launched a three-decades-long career of stu­pen­dous frauds. He con­vinced titans of busi­ness and shrewd sophis­ti­cates that he was British roy­al­ty, a movie pro­duc­er, a bond trad­er, a Rock­e­feller, and an expert in third world debt. And this only skims the sur­face. The biog­ra­phy, The Man in the Rock­e­feller Suit, by Mark Seal, is the defin­i­tive study. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing read, and I high­ly rec­om­mend it.

Dur­ing the Boston tri­al, psy­chi­atric experts opined that Ger­hart­sre­it­er suf­fered from nar­cis­sis­tic per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der. It seems obvi­ous they were right. He exploit­ed every­one around him and loved no one.

Except for Snooks. His friends say he was com­plete­ly devot­ed to her and she loved him, too. “I love you too much, Dad­dy,” they heard her say often.

Which brings us to the great irony of this sto­ry. An over­whelm­ing love for some­one oth­er than him­self brought down this relent­less­ly self­ish con-man. He risked every­thing for Snooks, and as a result, all his frauds and crimes came out in the open. Every­one knows who he is, includ­ing Snooks, who is now fif­teen. It seems unlike­ly that the lit­tle girl, who loved too much the man he was not, could pos­si­bly love at all the man he real­ly is. All the pun­ish­ment the jus­tice sys­tem has met­ed out to him must be a mere incon­ve­nience com­pared to that one irre­deemable heartbreak.