Hotel Honolulu

22 Nevermann the Searcher

"It's like that delightful evening you spend with your best friend and his wife in their cozy house, eating a home-cooked meal, and you think, Isn't it great to have a marriage like this!" Benno Nevermann, a visitor from Naples, Florida, said to me. "And then your friend, whom you took to be a wise old man, takes you aside and starts whispering about a girl he has fallen in love with."

I said, "And you're disillusioned and you think, What a fool."

"You're a fool and he's a bigger fool, and the whole bottomless world seems absurd and disloyal."

Nevermann was a good listener, which made him a more interesting talker. He had the irony of a true cynic, and a humorous way of expressing it. He traveled alone. He was a reader who usually took a book to the beach. Never a novel — he liked reading history, "delving into the past."

But when I inquired, he said he was not a war buff, and all he said of Pearl Harbor was "We trusted the Japanese!" and that he had no intention of visiting the Arizona Memorial: "It's too sad."

Nevermann's candor made me forthcoming. I said, "My version of your marriage story is that at the end of my visit, when I'm thinking, What a happy couple, the wife tells me pointedly how long it's been since her husband made love to her."

"I've been there," Nevermann said. "I was the husband."

In the tennis match of male conversation, such is the growing momentum of the serve-and-volley that I found I was telling Nevermann things I had not told my wife — not secrets but confidences of a sort. Nevermann's seriousness was persuasive, but also he seemed wise, someone I might learn to trust. Also, in that same tennis match, we serve confidences to people who we hope will lob their own secrets back to us. But after knowing him a while I saw Nevermann didn't need much encouragement. He had something on his mind; he was candid without requiring me to bare my soul.

Almost at the outset he explained to me that he had been very poor. He had grown up in a suburb of Chicago with his divorced mother. His father had remarried but within two years had been financially ruined and soon had committed suicide. After leaving high school, with no money for college ("But so what, college never gives you any useful job skills"), Nevermann got work in a factory. The factory made rust-proof garden furniture — Nevermann ran the vinyl-coating machine. He labored in stinking heat among vats of noxious polymers.

Intelligent and ambitious, Nevermann found ways of improving the machine so it was no longer necessary to dip the product. Instead a fitted sleeve was made for it. "A kind of extruded viny!" Nevermann explained. He patented this so-called Nevermann Sleeve and, applying the technology to other products in his basement, came up with a way of vinyl-coating window frames with the sleeve. He patented that process too, and registered the name Wadsworth's Weatherproof Windows. There was no Wadsworth, but Nevermann was a funny name, and anyway he needed some memorable alliteration. At last, here was a vinyl-coated window — tested in Chicago winters — that did not rust, chip, warp, or leak, nor ever needed to be painted.

He had no start-up money, did not trust investors or partners, so he became a salesman. For three or four years he drove all over the Midwest, taking orders and building up his business. He sometimes went abroad, to India and China. "I outsourced some of the machine-tooling."

"Outsourced" was an even better word than "extruded." Nevermann, who had moved from his basement to his garage to a small factory, now had a rapidly growing business. To keep costs down he relocated to Tennessee, where, during the building boom of the eighties, he sold the company for a large amount of money. He moved to Naples, Florida. He still made money on the patents he had taken out. He was then forty-five years old. He traveled and read. He recognized my name. He knew my books. This familiarity seemed to make him talkative, even confessional. Books and travel were not enough, he said.

"It's a secret, but I'll tell you what I really do," he said. "I look people up. I search them out and see what time has done to them."

"That's your hobby?"

"It's my passion," Nevermann said. "I'm a searcher."

"Give me an example."

Nevermann said, "When I was in high school I had a job in a supermarket. I was a terrible student, had no time to study, and we had so little money that I gave my whole salary to my mother. I envied the popular kids in the school — the jocks, the brainy kids, the beautiful girls, the rich ones who had new cars. One drove a Thunderbird."

That was in Des Plains, Illinois: Des Plains High. Years later, with the sale of the vinyl-coated-window company and the move to Florida, Nevermann went back to his hometown and traced the big shots and achievers from his high school class. Some of them had gone on to greater things — had married well, started businesses, succeeded as professionals; but Nevermann was interested in the nuances. One of the most accomplished was also an alcoholic. One of the wealthiest, George Kunkle, had lost his fortune gambling. The pretty girls in high school had become plain and middle-aged. Nevermann charted their rise and fall. He collected pictures. In albums he created little histories. The detail in his work gave it depth, and it resembled natural history, as though Nevermann were describing the life cycle of a new species. And it was intentionally specific. The high school friend Kunkle had insulted him one cold day when Nevermann was working at the supermarket. Kunkle approached him in the deli department and said, "Where can I get a hat like that?" Just a joke, but Kunkle's girlfriend was with him. Twenty-five years later Nevermann found Kunkle — broke, living in a welfare hotel in San Francisco. He was wearing an old hat that said Go 'Niners. Nevermann said, "Where can I get a hat like that?" and told him who he was.

"Not revenge, but justice — and revelation," Nevermann told me. It wasn't personal, and much of it was more complex than this. It made him a time traveler. His frugality as a salesman had forced him to stay in inexpensive motels and eat in cheap diners. He killed time in cocktail lounges, listening to music. He had written everything down — kept logs, diaries, journals — his struggle.

Decades later he looked up Florence Bestwick, who had served him breakfast in a diner outside St. Louis; Sylvia Shaw, who had sung "When You Wish Upon a Star" at the Four O'Clock Lounge in Columbus, Ohio; Fred Casey, who had fixed his car in Davenport, Iowa, when he had been on the road; Ronald Markham, a hotel clerk who had been rude to him in the Highlands Motel in Highlands Bluff, Missouri; Leda Hemperly, whom he had desired, who had gone to the senior prom with George Kunkle.

The oddest names, the deepest searches, were the most satisfying. Florence Bestwick was a widow and ran a catering service from home. Sylvia Shaw lived in a trailer park in Englewood, Florida, and was now the mother of a singer. Fred Casey had had a stroke. Nevermann gave them each a check for five hundred dollars. Ronald Markham, he had learned, had serviced swimming pools in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, after leaving the hotel and was now dead. He took Leda Hemperly out for a drink. He did not desire her. It was she who suggested staying the night, but Nevermann said, "Maybe some other time. Maybe never."

Old girlfriends, old enemies, old bosses, competitors from the past — they necessitated his groping in the wonderful tunnel of time, searching for

clues. Why had so few people succeeded? Why had so many failed? But for most of them nothing at all had happened except that time had passed and they had grown older: he found them living in the same town, on the same street, in the same house. Leda was one of those.

Nevermann had no wish to feel vindictive, nor any desire to gloat over anyone's disgrace. He wanted only pitiless excavation and discovery, and he undertook many of the searches because of the sheer difficulty they presented. Why else go to India? In October 1973 in New Delhi, on one of his outsourcing trips, he had heard a lovely young Indian woman sing a Carpenters song, "It's Yesterday Once More," in a hotel lounge.

The search took almost a month, but he found that woman. She was married to a businessman in Bombay. She was still lovely. She had a daughter in Chicago. "I used to live in Chicago!" Nevermann said. But that was not the point. In the process of finding the Indian woman he had learned to penetrate India.

Nevermann was not the eccentric millionaire people claimed he was when he found them and revealed himself. He had turned his excavation of the past into a quest, something almost existential, and it had given him a way of living, a mode of discovery, something purposeful.

"On the way I have found out so much about the world and met such amazing people," he said to me. "I would not have met you otherwise."

His searches gave the past meaning. They illustrated the passage of time. They made him kinder, he said: you saw how frail and fallible people were. He liked the surprises.

"I am a detective," he said, though he was soft-spoken, circumspect, and had the manner of an old priest. "But of course there is no crime, only existence."

"What's the point?"

"Time is pitiless, time is awful," he said. "Just to allow people to live is the greatest justice of all. It is not a reprieve — for most people it is punishment. I need to see it."

"What are you doing in Honolulu?" I asked.

"I came here to see Madam Ma, the journalist."

The mask-faced woman, mother of a murderer, who had seduced her own son. But I didn't say so.

"She was my mother," Nevermann said.