Chapter 1

Abraham's Voice My name is Abraham Isaac Lee, and I am my father's son. This is a story about Land and Love and a Great Fire that consumed all my father's dreams. If my voice sounds too ... too artificial, then I am happy. I sound like my father, my wife tells me. Even my sister, who has escaped her parents, who lives in the West, even she tells me that I am her father's son. At this moment I am wearing his clothes: a sweater seldom worn by him when it was new, a pale blue tie given to him by my mother, his brown penny loafers. I am in his image. My southern accent is subtle. My hair is parted as his was, but black, not red. Combed as close as possible to being like his on his wedding day. My speech is usually dramatic, my gestures are precise. Grace, my wife, tells me that I have been this way since even before my mother died. Grace, my precious and essential wife, whose name my father loves because he believes all names have power. My father, who believes every material object is a symbol that requires interpretation. My father named me; my mother named my sister. I am Abraham, and I am Isaac. Because of my father, I have never liked irony.

My father, my mother, Grace and her father, my sister, a short black man named Pete, a dog named Frank, a pilot named Harry, a girl named Polly, and a few others. All of them have a role to play.

And Alice, whose voice I hear even now, twenty-five years later, whose sad and smirky voice tells me that I must forgive myself. I always remember Alice when I go to Mass with Grace and my children. I was raised Catholic, as was Alice, but she lost her faith long before I accepted mine. When I sit in my photo gallery, looking out toward the ocean, I can hear her laugh and tell me that I need to get on with my life. That history did not stop in 1968.

Land and Love Turner West saw the land first, but my father was rich and bought most of it. Unlike other stories about land, this is not about farming or crops or man taming the wilderness. The land of this story was one square mile of Florida real estate halfway between Jacksonville and St. Augustine. A mile of beachfront and a mile deep into the scrubby interior, cut along the eastern edge by Highway A1A as it went south toward the Keys.

West saw the land in 1950 and knew it was where he wanted to build his funeral home. His father had been a mortician before him, and his brothers had gone into the same business in Georgia. In 1950, West had been driving down A1A and saw the sun rise over the Atlantic. He told his father, but the elder West was skeptical that a funeral home so far from a major city would ever be successful.

"The future," West had said to his father, "you have to think about the future, even in the funeral business."

West borrowed from his father and brothers and was able to buy two acres on the west side of A1A. The land sloped up and there was a clear view of the ocean, so the West Funeral Home opened its doors in 1951 on Easter morning. My father thought that was a nice touch, especially after he found out that Turner West was an atheist.

West may have been an atheist, but he was also an American Puritan. His work ethic was impeccable, and his funeral business prospered. He had no paid employees. His wife and six children worked with him. He personally trained his three oldest sons in mortuary science--a fact my father particularly admired about Turner West. In his own case, until he was ordered by the Duval County courts to obey the law, my father had educated me and my sister at home. I was twelve years old before I saw the inside of a classroom.

As an atheist, Turner West belonged to five churches and a synagogue. On Sunday morning he was up at dawn and attended services first at the downtown Jacksonville Baptist Church, then at the First Church of Christ at 9:30, followed by the Methodists at 11:00, the Episcopalians at 1:00, a late lunch at home, and finally 5:30 Mass at the Cathedral in St. Augustine. He was in temple on Saturday. He absorbed hours of religion every week, but he never volunteered for any committee work at any of the churches and always insisted that his name not appear in any printed material, except for the regular ad in each church's bulletin. His priest, pastor, and rabbi friends appreciated his humility. I know this because Grace West later explained to me why her father went to church.

"Contacts," she had said. "Everyone wants a friend in a time of need. Daddy is there for them because he has always been there. When the moment comes, Daddy says, they are lost. The living, that is, and they want someone who can understand their grief. Daddy has always been part of their congregation. Who else would they choose?"

My father understood perfectly how West's mind operated. My father, the agnostic.

"Abraham, he is a worthy opponent," my father would say. "He understands the power of symbols, even though he does not realize that he is the ultimate symbol himself."

On his two acres, West built his business and his home. The funeral home was styled after a southern plantation house, white columns and Jeffersonian arches. The West family lived in the back: Turner and his wife in a large bedroom over the garage full of hearses and limousines, their six sons sharing three small rooms on the ground floor next to the embalming room.

For my father, Turner West was an adversary. He was Death personified. My father was Life. If you think my father was crazy, you would find many people who agree with you.My father saw the sun rise over the Atlantic a year after Turner West did, and my father also saw the West Funeral Home and Chapel.

"This is the spot for my Great White Wall," he had told my mother, pointing to a large half-moon-shaped indentation that pushed A1A in a long arcing curve away from the ocean. Another visionary might have seen a perfect spot for a tourist hotel fronting a hard beach that could accommodate pale and flabby easterners and their two-ton cars. My father saw a drive-in theatre. It is a story my mother loved to tell. My father looked at the rising sun, turned 180 degrees, and faced the West Funeral Home. With both arms spread wide, he had said, "I will blot your sun out with a Wall of Life. I will put you in the dark."

"I told your father that he was crazy"--my mother would laugh"--but that I loved him anyway."

It was not really a personal vendetta against Turner West. That came later. But on that first day, my father had simply had a vision about what to do with his money, the ample and undeserved money handed down to him as the last of the Lee family from Winston-Salem.

I give you these details to make sure you do not fall into the easy interpretation that others have. Too many people have told me that the war made my father crazy. But that's not true. My father was disjointed even before going to Korea a week after seeing his land in Florida. My mother told me all the stories about his family, the death of his parents in a murder-suicide, how he found them the summer before his senior year in high school.

"He was different after that, the rest of his family told me," she would say. "Not as quiet, not the shy child they had known before then, just not the same. And he went to Korea knowing that he would not die, that he had to come back here to build his dream. He sent me drawings every month, gave me specific instructions for the contractors, and even made me go to California to buy those giant redwoods. He also told me that you and Louise were going to be our children, described you exactly as you were, even before I saw you." She told me all this, and then she would smile that smile my father must have loved the first time he saw her.

Turner West married his high school sweetheart. They were virgins in both body and heart. I have seen their wedding pictures. Imagine a handsome version of Abraham Lincoln, literally, and you have Turner West. Tall, angular, sad eyes, coal-black hair, long arms, but with a movie-star quality. His wife was short and a bit plump. They had kissed at seventeen, pledged their love at eighteen, married at twenty-two, and deflowered themselves on their Atlanta honeymoon. He had told her that he was going to be a mortician like his father and grandfather, and she had still agreed to be his wife.

Her name was Grace, and she was a natural consoler. It was she who had early contact with the next of kin in those brutal first moments on the phone when the living start the dead on their last journey. West could never believe his luck in finding her. She was his wife, lover, mother, friend, and partner. In the first ten years of marriage, they had their six sons. By the time the West Funeral Home was opened, the three oldest were trained to be their father's assistants, and the younger three were destined for the same career. The youngest was old enough to drive one of the limousines in the daily processions that began under Turner West's bedroom.

On the day two barges landed on the beach--two barges each supporting one end of the first of those hundred-foot redwoods that had been shipped from California down the Pacific coast, through the Panama Canal, up past Cuba to float offshore of the land my father had bought--on that day, Turner West's wife died.

They had been foolish, they told themselves. She was too old to have another child. It had not been planned. It could have been terminated. Even in those unenlightened days, there were ways. But then they had looked at each other and knew that things would be all right.

In the waiting room, however, Turner West had been told there was something wrong, and his long legs had outraced the doctor back to the delivery room. His wife was dead, but his daughter was alive. When the nurse asked what her name was, West had thought she meant his wife. "Grace. Her name is Grace," he had said, and that was the name they put on the birth certificate.

If you had asked Turner West what he remembered about the next three months he could not tell you, because he remembered nothing. Then, sitting in his bedroom one dark morning, he heard a baby cry. Grace was in a crib in the room in which she had been conceived, in the room where she was to sleep in a bed next to her father's bed for the next five years. Turner West had rocked his daughter back to sleep, and then he walked to the front of his funeral home to look out the window. At that particular moment he saw the Flamingo Drive-In Theatre blocking his view of the morning sun.

Hubert Thomas Lee met my mother in a graduate class on Dante at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. When the professor had said, without a trace of irony, that the punishment in the Inferno for adultery was to suffer eternal orgasm, pleasure so prolonged and intense that it became pain, my father had whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, "I'll take my chances."

Only one person laughed. My father looked at her and decided to ask her for a date. When she stood up to leave, he had second thoughts. Edna Marie Scott was six feet tall, a beautiful but sturdy six feet tall. My father was five nine.

Neither was a virgin, but nobody knew that about Edna Marie. Everybody knew that Hubert T. Lee was a rogue. Loud, not as charming as he thought he was, too quick to spend the famous Lee tobacco money, a drinker, and a lover of women. He had always bragged about his goal of marrying a movie star, of himself being a movie star. A month after meeting Edna Marie Scott, Hubert Lee was engaged to her. The wedding was a Roman carnival. The Scott family of Greensboro was richer than the Lee family of Winston-Salem. And everyone agreed: My father did not deserve my mother.

When I was sixteen, Alice Kite pointed out to me an obvious truth about my parents.

"Everybody says your daddy is crazy, Abraham, but have you ever asked yourself what kind of person marries a crazy person? Your mother must be as crazy as him, but in her own way. Don't you think so?"

My father was five feet nine inches tall. My mother was six feet. He weighed 140 pounds; she weighed 160. He had red hair and green eyes; she had blond hair and blue eyes. Can you imagine how my sister and I look? You are wrong.

For the last time: My name is Abraham Isaac Lee, and I am my father's son.

My father handed me over to my mother when I was three months old, placed me in her arms as she met him on a dock in Seattle. He was home from Korea with me and Louise.

I was born in an orphanage hospital in Seoul. Louise was born the same day. The woman whose body carried me was eighteen years old, and the man who impregnated her was probably in his early twenties. He was a soldier in the Korean army, but little else is known about him. The young girl was a high school graduate and in excellent health. They were not married, and they were not my parents.

I am a full-blooded Korean. Black hair, black eyes, a broad nose, skin a blend of yellow and brown. For my eighteenth birthday my father took me back to Korea "to see your roots," as he put it. Even then, I was wearing his clothes, because we were the same size. We went to the orphanage and looked for more records about my biological past, but there was no paper trail. I was introduced to Bertha Holt. She and her husband, Harry, had founded the Holt Adoption Agency. My father sends her a thousand dollars every year, and every year, my father says, "They send a thousand babies to their parents." He likes the number connection, but Bertha Holt told me that my father tends to exaggerate. She was amused when I said, "Oh, really?"

The Holts were my father's friends during the war, and they helped him adopt me and Louise even though, as she said, "Your father did not fit all our guidelines."

My blood is Korean. We all have some doubt about Louise. I have always been self-conscious about my appearance, especially since it doesn't match how I see myself. I have been told that I am handsome. Even if I discount the opinion of my parents and wife, others have often remarked on how "distinguished" I seem. I look "wise," my teachers would tell me. The only person I have ever seen who I thought looked like a wise man was Turner West. I said that to my father once. He looked down at me, peering over the top of his glasses, and said, "Turner West looks like the Devil. Dressing all in black, Isaac, does not make you look wise. It just makes you look like a preacher or an undertaker. And both of them are doing the Devil's work."

So, I look handsome, distinguished, or wise. And I always look Korean. Louise simply looks like no one else in this world. The woman who gave birth to her was thirty-five; the man who impregnated that woman was a mystery. At least, the woman who gave birth said she had no idea who the father was. Looking at Louise , you can come to only one conclusion: The man was not Korean. She has the best of Asian and Caucasian features. Beautiful skin, dark eyes but not narrow, a perfectly shaped American nose. Even today, men and women stare at her when she passes them.

When we were tiny, my mother used to tell us, "They would stop me in the grocery store and ask about both of you. They would pat you on the head, Isaac, but with Louise they would reach out with the tip of one finger and touch her cheek as if they were seeing if she was real."

Before you overinterpret, forget about trying to tie my father to the mysterious white lover of a Korean woman. Louise has no feature in any way remotely similar to our father's. He would often joke about the possibility, telling her that she was a "half-baked Lee pie." But we all knew it was not true. If anything, Louise looked more like my mother, especially the way they both would stare at my father when he was trying to be funny but failing, a look of infinite patience and pity. "Lee pie" jokes were never funny.

My father found us in Korea.

"I was in a room of crying babies, and you two were the only quiet ones," he would say. I believed that story for years until my mother told me the truth.

"Your father had found a baby in a ditch, abandoned and crying, and he was taking it to Harry Holt. The baby died before he got to the orphanage, but he did not know. He made one of his grand entrances, telling the night nurse to make way for Jehovah and baby Moses. And he handed over a dead child. After the nurse told him, your father sat in a corner waiting for Harry. He sat there for hours, be, told me, thinking about me and the land that was waiting for him in America. Surrounded by sleeping babies, your father found you. Your Korean name was written on the card attached to your crib. You were Lee Sung Kyung. You know your father, Isaac. The moment he saw that Lee name he knew it was a sign of something. You were his."

After she told me about how my father found me, I asked my mother about Louise.

"Oh, her." She laughed. "Your sister was supposed to be your twin. At least in your father's mind. A boy for him, a girl for me. She was in the crib next to yours, and when he picked you up she started to cry. In fact, I think she cried for the first three years of her life. Ear infections, allergies, pneumonia, every plague available to torture a parent. Your sister was an unattractive chore for all of us. Not like you, so calm, so happy. Louise was never happy, not even when she turned out to be so beautiful."

My sister is indeed beautiful, with only one physical flaw. She limps when she gets too emotional--mad or happy, anything. By sheer force of will and self-control, she can walk straight. Doctors could have fixed it with leg braces when she was still growing up, but my mother did not let them.

Even today, as famous as my sister is because of her acting career, few people know. No studio, no producer or director, no critic, no paparazzi ... nobody has ever seen her limp.

If you go to the library you can find a copy of the June 4, 1953, issue of Life magazine. All of us are there: my father, mother, sister, me, Turner West, Grace, and the Flamingo Drive-In Theatre. A two-page article with six pictures. My father has had a lifetime subscription to Life, and I have all the copies in my garage. Grace tells me that they are a fire hazard. My father thinks she is being ironic.

The story is titled "A Southern Wonder of the World." The editors had wanted to emphasize the geographic and architectural oddity of the Flamingo. In their minds, its being in the South and my father's being a remote descendant of Robert E. Lee combined to make an obvious statement about southern culture. When my father saw the article, after weeks of waiting, he exploded. "I am no southern cracker, and I represent nothing but myself!" For my father, southern culture was an abomination. My father cursed the South; my mother was a Southern Belle.

"Hubert Thomas Lee," she would say to him as they sat at opposite ends of our fifteen-foot dining-room table, "you may deny your own southern heritage, you may desecrate the temple of your southern elders, you may ignore your own southern accent, but never forget that your children were born in South Korea."

I would look at Louise and read her minced lips--"They're both crazy."

Life had come to record the construction of the world's largest drive-in theatre, but the writer would not quote my father as he wanted. "Not in size, young man, not in size is this wall large, but in meaning. This is my challenge to God. My fist in his unseen face, the chip on my shoulder, the line in the sand."

Years later, I would come to understand that my father had lost his faith in God as he, seventeen years old, listened to a preacher try to explain his parents' death to a church full of mourners. For the rest of his life, my father wanted God's attention, to force God to answer to him, Hubert Thomas Lee. The Flamingo was an invitation.

The Life writer left confused, and the story became a simple tale of a "colorful southerner" and his "charmingly attractive" wife, descriptions that earned the writer the lifelong wrath of Hubert Lee and Edna Scott.

The words of the story were a complete distortion of reality, but the pictures did not lie. The Flamingo was a wonder of the world in 1953. If anyone tried to do the same thing today, he would be flailed by every environmental group and harassed by every government agency charged with protecting the public interest. My father's vision was a white monster that violated the natural world and turned night into day.

"Isaac, you must remember, with enough money you can build anything. You can even turn back the ocean." That was my father's explanation for the Flamingo.

On the first day, my father was overseer to the construction of a half-mile-long seawall that divided the beach along a north-south line that marked the highest water point of the year. Thus, at high tide the Atlantic threw itself against this six-foot stone wall and then retreated. At low tide, we had a hundred feet of hard white sand on the east side of the wall. The actual work took a month, but my father divided his paid labor into biblical units. The wall was day one.

My father called that wall his Maginot Line. "No illusions, Isaac, about the wall. When the time comes, God will jump this bump and head for Paris."

Paris was the screen tower. And it was the Tower that Life had come to photograph.

The Tower was a hundred and fifty feet high, two hundred feet across, and fifty feet wide at the base. Facing the ocean was the blank white screen. Facing A1A was the world's largest neon marquee, a glaring pink flamingo whose head continually dipped and whose body rested on one leg while the other extended and retracted. Florida nights along A1A were more pink than black, a glowing pink that softened everything, a pink that Turner West called "worthy of a New Orleans whorehouse."

In May 1968, Alice Kite took me out on the ocean in a leaky boat to see my father's Tower. A mile offshore at three in the morning, just as the closing credits had finished on the last movie of a triple bill, the screen went white and then dark, and, for the few minutes left before Pete Maws turned off the marquee, she and I gazed at the pink glow that seemed to pulsate out from the sides and top of the Tower, a rectangular void surrounded by halos of pink light.

"Izzy, you live in Wonderland. You know that, don't you?" she said, a month before my sixteenth birthday.

So, my family lived in the world's largest screen tower. That was the "hook" of the Life story. Southern aristocrats, Asian children, and Hollywood--believe it or not.

One of the pictures that Life published showed the inside of the Tower. My father had insisted that the world see how it was held together. "Not just size, but strength," he had told the writer. My mother would tell me these stories about my father when I was sick and had to stay in my Tower bedroom while the movies were showing on the other side of my shuttered window.

"He would tell that young man exactly why we had used certain materials and certain designs, and I could see him taking notes. But he never used the exact words. I suppose he thought your father was just teasing him. But, Isaac, you know your father. When he told the young man that he had built this Tower to be his home, to be indestructible, to withstand the mightiest hurricane, to protect his family from the wrath and pettiness of almighty God--well, your father was not teasing at all. Your father was serious. Of course, sometimes even I can't tell, but that time with the young man I knew he was serious."

Six ancient redwoods, one at each corner and two facing each other in the middle, were the strongest part of the Tower's skeleton. Severed and stripped in California, they were replanted twenty feet deep in the Florida sand and dirt. The crossbeams were Texas oak trees, squared at twenty-four inches, shortened to fifty-foot lengths. Connecting the redwoods and the oaks were hundreds of short steel rods and thousands of oak planks. Within the white skin of the Tower was a maze of lumber held together by a ton of nails, bolts, and screws. My father's engineers told him that he was "overbuilding," but he told them that when God came knocking he wanted to be ready.

On top of the Tower was a custom-made RCA speaker horn. Some of you reading this might not have ever been to a drive-in theatre. If you have, chances are that you never went to one that did not have car speakers. In the beginning, all drive-ins had a large born on top of the screen tower. That was the reason most drive-ins were built away from populated areas. As cities spread farther out, drive-ins developed the car speaker. My father hated them, but even he had to acquiesce to the change in 1960. For those first seven years, our parking surface was unblemished by speaker poles. But the voices on-screen, the crack of gunfights, the violins of love, the drone of airplanes, the weeping of infants--all could be heard for miles offshore. Until John Kennedy was elected President, anyone with a boat could see a free movie at the Flamingo.

So Life had six pictures. A mile offshore looking back to show now that white screen dominated the view. From across the highway to show the Flamingo marquee. My mother and father holding Louise and me, still in diapers, in the concession stand. The playground at the foot of the Tower, a playground that impressed parents because of how many slides and rides there were. A fifth picture showing how we lived inside the Tower, including our dining room that could seat twenty people.

It was the last picture, the two-page full spread, that my father liked the most. Taken from the top of the Tower, it showed the Florida landscape stretching out for miles. That was also the picture that showed Turner West. A quarter mile down A1A the West Funeral Home was reduced to the size of a toy. A magnifying glass would show you Turner West himself, standing at his front door and holding Grace in his arms, staring at my father, who was standing on top of the Tower looking down at him.

The Great Fire occurred the summer of my sixteenth birthday. The year was 1968. My father always appreciated the overlap of social and personal symbolism.

Use of this excerpt from The Flamingo Rising by Larry Baker may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice: copyright ©1997 by Larry Baker. All Rights Reserved.