Shadenfreude II

Woe to any man when his two ex-wives get together and compare notes! I would not wish that on anybody... well, except perhaps for MY ex. I learned so-o-o-o-o much!

We were all in the middle of a lawsuit, and it turns out that Marian and I were on the same side, combining forces at the suggestion of our lawyers. No sense reinventing the legal wheel each step of the way. But this all needs a context.

Back at the end of 1981, Paul came up from where he lived in Pawhuska, OK for a post-divorce conjugal visit. A see-the-kids-for-X-mas kind of visit. A last-ever kind of visit, though he never breathed a word of that at the time. The day after he returned home he married Marian, getting it in before the tax deadline. He called a few days later to let me know, one of those don’t-bother-me-anymore calls. He hadn’t bothered to tell me during his visit what he was planning, and yes, it was something that was planned. (I’m just guessing here that he also didn’t bother to tell her just where he slept on that visit.) No more communication, no visits, nothing. Child support got paid for a while after, and then nada there too.

While we were married, the family made it known that a large inheritance was expected. For generations back it was a very small family, single child of a single child, etc. The one exception was Great Uncle Irvin Rosa, (a? the?) founder and president of Jostens, the place where you get your class rings. Every year end the bank handling his trust send out an annual report, and it was passed around and discussed, noting whether its value went up or down, how much was paid out for Paul’s grandmother Annis while she lived, and how much was kept inviolate for Irvin’s widow Phyllis. Paul always said that half his share would go to his kids, evenly split. He even insisted it got written up in the divorce papers.

Several years after the divorce, I had a friend who was an attorney, and he suggested that I (pay him to) write a letter to the bank, requesting to be notified when Phyllis died and the trust was to be paid out. It was done and forgotten for years, until out of the blue Bill called to inform me that bank notified him that not only had Phyllis died, but my ex had as well, and my children were due to inherit! We had no idea Paul had died, or when or how. I felt it my duty as their mother to tell the children, and we went through several emotional days. I had also called his brother John, asking him what had happened and how had I never been informed? Strangely, he also had no clue, but promised to look into it for me.

A couple days later, the answer came back: Paul wasn’t dead, just hiding from his creditors. Nobody ever owned up to sending the “he’s dead” letter to the bank. Also in this information was the fact that the trust was now worth nearly 2 1/2 million dollars, and under its terms, each brother got half. Their mother still was alive and healthy, but as a widow of a direct relative of Irvin’s, she did not inherit. Nor did Paul’s children, at least not directly.

Paul, being the upstanding citizen that he is, immediately did two things: he filed for federal bankruptcy, and had his attorney contact the trustees and say in legal terms, “you haven’t found him yet.” If they didn’t officially “find” him within six months of his filing for bankruptcy, his $1.2 million would not be considered among his assets, and thus not tapped to settle his debts.

My attorney friend told me to find myself a properly qualified attorney in the field to fight for both my years of back child support and a share of the inheritance that he’d promised his kids in the divorce decree. The fellow he recommended passed me on to another fellow even better qualified. The only glitch was that this kind of case was not taken on a contingency basis, and I had nearly no money, raising three kids without support on a very modest income. After consulting with his partners, my attorney got back to me saying he’d take the case on a contingency basis after all, noting that it had been a long time since he’d had such an “interesting” case. He even thanked me.

The fight began.

Now Marian comes into the picture, though I didn’t know it at the time. Paul had adopted her two children just after he married her. He now lived in North Carolina, having divorced her. (Or maybe it was more like she divorced him, after finding out abut his two fiancees in two other states. But that was a later story.) This again was news, although I had started calling myself “his first ex-wife” about a year after we lost contact, just from spite. Paul owed Marian both alimony, which I had never claimed, and child support. She had connections, and even though it was a protracted fight for her, with the entrenched good-ol'-boys network working against any woman who had the gall to hound a father for child support of his abandoned children, she finally got the Governor’s ear for an extradition order. It was a felony for a father to leave the state of Oklahoma to avoid paying child support. So they found Paul, brought him back, and let him sit in jail until the money was paid.

That was what gave me a break, because in order to get out of jail, Paul had to contact the trustees and beg for an early partial pay-out. He had been officially “found”. Now that we knew about Marian’s case we decided to combine forces. The attorneys contacted a judge in Owatonna, where the trust was set up, informing him of Paul’s inheritance and persuading him that not including it in the bankruptcy as an asset was equivalent to perpetrating a fraud on the government. It got ruled in two days before the six-month deadline!

Now came months of waiting, letter-writing by the attorneys, consultations, locating and organizing documents. Shortly before we both had a final settlement, I received a completely unexpected call from Marian. She had some interesting tales to tell.

She had decided not to dislike me, even after what Paul had told her about what kind of a terrible person I was. It seems she got enough of a taste of what he was like while married to him that she chose to disbelieve his wild tale about coming home too early from an over-the-road trucking gig and finding me in bed with the football team or some such. I think her first clue might have been that he was never a trucker in his life, but rather a computer programmer/systems analyst. But that came to her later.

Another indication of his veracity happened during a neighborhood get-together, sort of a block party, with all the families getting together over food and fun. This was back after we’d (USA) been involved in a lot of risky flights over Cuba, perhaps rescue missions though I’m very hazy on the details. It was very hush-hush, top secret in real life. When conversation turned to those events, Paul started spinning a tale about having been in the CIA and being involved as a pilot and hero. While he might have been taken with a grain of salt by ordinary neighbors, he happened to do his yarn-spinning in front of someone who was the real deal, a been-there-done-that-got-the-T-shirt kind of guy, who called Paul out on it in front of everybody. Unfortunately, this wasn’t just reflected back on Paul. The kids were harassed and ostracized in school, called liars just like their dad, and were made generally miserable through no action of their own.

That alone wasn’t what caused their divorce. Paul’s job was as an independent contractor, and sometimes his contracts were with companies needing him to troubleshoot their systems out-of-state. One night Marian got a phone call from a North Carolina hospital asking for insurance information. Being a proper good wife, she flew out to comfort her poor injured husband. This is where she found out the circumstances of his injury.

There had been a party, with a lot of drinking going on, at least on Paul’s part, busy having a good time with what turned out to be one of his two fiancees. (The other fiancé was in Tennessee, though presumably he didn’t see too much of her since there was a bench warrant out on him there for failure to appear on a multiple count drug charge. He would be arrested if caught crossing the state line.) Location was the key here: the party was at a private home located along a lake. Or rather, what had been a lake, created by damming across a small river and waiting for it to back up and fill in. For some reason it was currently drained, but the dock still stood. Paul, in the dark and being drunk, decided to take a swim by jumping off the end of the dock. The result was one ankle broken, the other shattered. I’m told he fought going to the hospital, knowing what the outcome with his wife would be.

While I ate up these stories eagerly, having had no contact or information for years, it was the last one Marian told me that gave me particular satisfaction: definitely a case of schadenfreude.

I had known about the extradition for several months. I just hadn’t known the details.

My mental image of extradition came from TV and movie scenes of a deputy leading a handcuffed prisoner onto a plane, there cuffing him to the armrest for the duration of the flight.

Not hardly!

For one thing, I guess he just wasn’t dangerous enough. And even though he was being returned on a felony warrant, a guy who didn’t pay child support just wasn’t taken seriously. As a result, once he was picked up, he was locked in the back of the local squad car, dumped in the local jail, forced to wait until somebody found the time to transport him in the same fashion to the next county’s jail. And on, and on. He didn’t get his phone call to fix his problem until the end. From North Carolina to Oklahoma took two weeks! TWO WHOLE WEEKS!

It’s still satisfying.