Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I repeat: it was not my intention to hurt my high school sweetheart.

  In my anxiety, I must have mixed too much of the barbiturate into the cola drink. I’d taken a number of capsules from my mother’s medicine cabinet, broken them and carefully poured the white powder into a tissue; this tissue, wrapped in cellophane, I’d been carrying in my pocket for what seemed like months, but could have been only two or three weeks. I knew that my opportunity would come if I was patient, and I had no choice but to be patient. And that March afternoon, when Babs and I were alone together in the green room, and no one near, and no one knowing of us, and she sent me to her locker to fetch her opened bottle of cola while she used the girls’ backstage lavatory, I knew that this was meant to be: almost, I had no choice. I siphoned the white powder into the virulent dark chemical drink, replaced the top and turned it upside down, shook it gently. Babs took no notice of the barbiturate, for she drank the cola in distracted swallows while trying to memorize her lines, and was on her feet, restless and impatient, having decided that the secret to Williams’s heroine was her anger, hidden beneath layers of girlish verbiage of which the playwright himself hadn’t been aware. “Cripples are always angry, I bet. I’d sure be, in their place.”

  Roland, sitting on an old worn corduroy-covered sofa, waiting anxiously for the sleeping potion to take effect, murmured yes, he guessed Babs must be right.

  She continued with her lines, reciting, forgetting and needing to be prompted, remembering, reciting, moving her arms, making her face “expressive”; the more she rehearsed Laura, the more Laura eluded her, like a mocking phantom. Ten minutes passed, with excruciating slowness; I felt beads of sweat break out on my heated face, and trickle down my thin sides; fifteen minutes passed, and by slow degrees Babs appeared to be getting drowsy; then by sudden degrees she became very drowsy; murmuring she didn’t know what was wrong with her, she was feeling so tired, couldn’t keep her eyes open. She knocked the cola bottle over; what remained of the liquid spilled out onto the already stained carpet. Abruptly then she slumped down at the far end of the sofa, and within seconds was asleep.

  I sat without moving, not even looking directly at her, at first, for some time. The magic had worked! It wasn’t believable, yet it had happened; Roland could have no real power over a girl like Babs Hendrick, yet—this had happened. Yes I was elated. Ecstatic! Yes I was terrified. For what I had done, the crudest of tricks, I could not undo.

  Not scrawny brainy Roland, that shy boy, but another person, calculating and almost-calm, moved at last from his position on the sofa, and stood trembling with excitement over the sleeping girl. Beautiful when awake and animated, Babs was yet more beautiful in sleep; waxy-skinned, and vulnerable; she seemed much younger than seventeen; her face was pale and slack and her lips parted, like a sleeping baby’s; her arms were limp, her legs sprawled like the legs of a rag doll. She wore a pale yellow angora sweater with short puffy sleeves, and a charcoal-gray pleated skirt. (This predated the era of universal blue jeans.) I whispered, “Babs? Babs?” and she gave no sign of hearing. She was breathing in deep, erratic, shuddering breaths and her eyelids were quivering. My fear was that she’d wake suddenly and see me standing over her and know what I’d done, and begin to scream; and what would happen to Roland the doctor’s son, then? I dared to touch her arm, and shook her, gently. “Babs? What’s wrong?” So far, what was happening wasn’t suspicious, exactly. (Was it?) Kids often fell asleep in school, cradling their heads on their arms in the library, or in study hall; in boring classes nearly everyone nodded off, at times. Self-dramatizing young actors, complaining of exhaustion and overwork, stole naps in the green room, and tales were told of couples “sleeping” on the infamous corduroy couch when they were assured of a few minutes’ quick-snatched privacy. Babs, like her popular friends, stayed up late, talking and laughing over the telephone, as I’d gathered from overhearing their conversations, and she’d been anxious about the play, and sleep-deprived, so it wasn’t so unlikely that, in the midst of going over her lines with me, she might become exhausted suddenly and fall asleep. None of this was suspicious. Not yet!

  But Roland’s behavior was beginning to be suspicious, wasn’t it? For stealthily he went to the door, which had no lock, and dragged a heavy leather armchair in front of it, to prevent the door from being opened suddenly. (There were likely to be a few teachers and students remaining in the building, even past six o’clock.) He switched off all the lights in the windowless room except one, a flickering fluorescent tube on the verge of burning out. He spoke gently, cautiously to the deeply breathing, sleeping girl, “Babs? Babs? It’s just me. Rollie.” For long mesmerized seconds he stood above her, staring. The elusive girl of his fever-dreams! His high school sweetheart, whom his father had tried to forbid him. Unclean. Compulsive. Self-abuse. Daringly Roland touched the girl again, caressing her shoulder like a film lover, and her arm in the fuzzy angora sweater, and her limp, chill fingers. He was breathing quickly now, and he’d become sticky with sweat. If he leaned closer, if he kissed her? (But how did you kiss a girl like Babs Hendrick?) Just her forehead? Would she wake suddenly, would she begin to scream? “It’s just me. Rollie. I love you.” Suddenly he wondered, with a stab of jealousy, whether Hal McCreagh had ever seen Babs like this. So deeply asleep! So beautiful! He wondered what Hal did to Babs, when they were alone together in Hal’s car. Kissing? (Tongue kissing?) Touching, fondling? “Petting”? It excited Roland, and infuriated him, to imagine.

  But Hal wasn’t here now. Hal knew nothing of this interlude. This “rehearsal.” There was no longer any Hal. There was only Roland the doctor’s brainy, beloved son.

  He was trembling badly now. Shaking. A powerful throbbing ache in his groin which he tried to ignore, and a rapid beating of his heart. This could not be happening, could it? How could this be happening? Bringing his lips against the girl’s strangely cool, clammy forehead. It was the first true kiss of his life. Babs’s silky-blond head had fallen limply back against the soiled armrest of the sofa, and her mouth had dropped open. Her eyelids were oddly bluish, and fluttering as if she wanted desperately to open them, but could not. “Babs? Don’t be afraid.” He kissed her cheek, he stooped to kiss her mouth, that hung open, slack, helpless, a string of saliva trailing down her chin. The taste of her mouth excited him terribly. With his tongue he licked her saliva. Like tasting blood. Roland the vampire. That first kiss! His brain seemed to go black. He was seized by a powerful need to grab hold of the girl, hard. To show her who was master. But he restrained himself, for Roland was not such a person; Roland was a good boy, and would never harm anyone. (Would he?) Babs Hendrick was, he knew, a good Christian girl, as he was a good Christian boy; what harm could come to them really? If he meant no harm, harm would not ensue. He would be protected. The girl would be protected. He’d begun to notice her strange, labored breathing, audible as a grown man’s breathing in stress, and yet he did not somehow absorb the possible meaning of such a symptom though he was (but right now, was not) Roland the doctor’s son. He was trembling with excitement. His hand, which seemed to him slightly distorted as if seen through a magnifying lens, reached out to smooth the silky blond hair, and cradle it in his fingers. He stroked the nape of the girl’s neck, slowly he caressed her shoulder, her left breast, delicately touching the breast with his fingertips, that fuzzy pale yellow angora wool that was so beautiful; he cupped his hand (but was this his hand?) beneath the small, shapely breast, gently and then with more assurance he caressed, he squeezed lightly. “Babs! I l-love you.” The girl moaned in her heavy, stuporous sleep, a sexual moan it seemed to Roland, who was himself whimpering with excitement; but she didn’t wake; his power over her, Roland’s revenge, was that she could not wake; she was at his mercy, and he would be merciful; she was utterly helpless and vulnerable, and he would not take advantage of her as one of the crude Indian River High boys would have done in his place (Would he?) In even the most lurid of his dreams he hadn’t defiled his sweetheart.
(At least that he’d allowed himself to remember.) In a cracked, hoarse, half-pleading voice whispering, “Babs? Don’t be afraid, I would never hurt you, I love you.” And the blackness rose swooning in him a second time, annihilating his brain; and he would not afterward recall all that happened in that dim-lit windowless room, on the shabby corduroy sofa, or was caused to happen, perceived as through a distorting lens that both magnified and reduced vision.

  When again Roland was able to see clearly, and to think, he saw to his horror that it was nearly six-thirty. And still the stricken girl slept on the corduroy sofa, the sound of her breathing now filling the airless room. Her head lay at a painful angle on the soiled armrest and her arms and legs were limp, loose as those of a rag doll. Except now her unseeing eyes were partly open, showing a crescent of white. Anxiously he whispered, “Babs? Wake up.” He felt panic: hearing voices in the corridor beyond the backstage area, boys’ voices, perhaps basketball players leaving practice; and Hal McCreagh was among these, or might have been, for Hal was on the team; and what would Roland do, and what would be done to Roland, if he were discovered like this, in hiding, guilty-faced, with Babs Hendrick sprawled on the sofa helpless in sleep, her hair disheveled and her clothing in disarray? Hurriedly, with shaking fingers, Roland readjusted the fuzzy angora sweater, and the pleated skirt. Whimpering, pleading for the girl to wake up, please would she wake up, yet like Sleeping Beauty in the Disney film, she would not wake up; she was under a curse; she would not wake up for him.

  For the first time it occurred to the trembling boy that he might have given his sweetheart too strong a dose of the drug. What if she never woke up? (But what was too strong, he had no idea. Half the bottle of six-milligram capsules? That odorless chalky-white powder?)

  Panic swept over him then. No, he wouldn’t think of that.

  On a shelf amid tattered copies of play scripts he found a frayed light-wool blanket to draw gently over Babs. He tucked the blanket beneath her damp chin, and spread her blond, wavy hair in a fan around her head. She would sleep until the drug wore off, and then she would wake; if Roland—“Rollie”—was very lucky, she wouldn’t remember him; if he was unlucky, well—he wouldn’t think of that. (And he did not.) Stealthily then he fled, and was unseen. He would leave the single fluorescent light flickering. He would slip from the green room to the darkened backstage area, and make his way out into a rear corridor, not taking the most obvious, direct route (which would have brought him into a corridor contiguous with the corridor that led to the boys’ locker room), and so, breathless, he would flee the scene of the crime, which in his heart he could not (could he?) acknowledge was a crime, even into his sixty-first year, when R_ had long replaced both Roland and “Rollie.” Contemplating then through the distorting lens of time the pale, calm-seeming doctor’s son safe in the brick house on Church Street, and safe in his room immersed in geometry homework at eight-twenty that evening, the approximate time that Babs Hendrick’s heart ceased beating.

  The Glass Menagerie would not be performed that spring at Indian River High.

  Clifford Seales would be suspended without salary from the school, and his contract terminated soon after, during the Indian River police investigation into the barbiturate death of Seales’s seventeen-year-old student Babs Hendrick. Though not enough evidence would be gathered against Seales to justify a formal arrest, Seales would remain the prime suspect in the case, and his guilt taken for granted. Forty-five years later in Indian River if you speak of Babs Hendrick’s death, you’ll be told in angry disgust that the girl’s English teacher, an alcoholic pervert who’d molested other girl students over the years, drugged her with barbiturates to perform despicable sexual acts upon her, and killed her in the process. You will be told that Seales managed to escape prosecution, though of course his life was ruined, and he would die, divorced and disgraced, of a massive heart attack a few years later.

  Ladies and gentlemen, you will ask: had the Indian River Police no other suspects? Possibly yes. Practicably speaking, no. Even today, small-town police departments are ill-equipped to undertake homicide investigations in which neither witnesses nor informants come forward. Dusting for fingerprints in the “green room” yielded a treasure trove of prints, but all of these, even Seales’s, were explainable. DNA evidence (saliva, semen) would have convicted the guilty individual, but DNA evidence was unknown at that time. And the boy, the shy bespectacled doctor’s son Roland, was but one of a number of high school boys, including the dead girl’s boyfriend, whom the police questioned; he was not singled out for suspicion, spoke earnestly and persuasively to police officers, even defending (in his naïveté) the notorious Seales, and was never to behave in any way that might be labeled suspicious. In a state of suspended animation. No emotion, only wonder. That I, Roland, had done such a thing. I, a victim, to have wielded such power!

  If my mother was ever to discover that a bottle of old prescription sleeping pills was missing from her medicine cabinet, she never spoke of her discovery and what it might mean.

  It would be rumored (but never printed in any newspaper or uttered on radio or TV) that “sick, disgusting things” had been done to Babs Hendrick’s helpless body before her death; only a “pervert” could have done such acts upon a comatose victim. But there would never be any arrest of this criminal, and therefore there was no trial. And no public revelations.

  (What “sick, disgusting things” were done to my sweetheart, I don’t know. Another individual must have slipped into the green room between the time Roland fled and Babs died later that evening.)

  The sick horror of mystery that remains unsolved.

  You will ask: did the killer never confess?

  The superficial answer is no, the killer never confessed. For he did not (did he?) truly believe himself a killer; he was a good, Christian boy. And he was (and is) a coward, contemptible. The more complex answer is yes, the killer confessed, and has confessed many times during his long and “distinguished” career. Each work of fiction he has written has been a confession, and an exultation. For, having committed an act of mystery in his adolescence, he understood that he’d proved himself and need never commit another; forever afterward, he would be an elegist of mystery, and honored for his style.

  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for this new honor.

  In the sudden silence, R self-consciously stacked his manuscript pages together to signal that “The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery” was over, as we in the audience, his friends and admirers, sat stunned, in a paralysis of shock and indecision. R ’s story had been compelling, and his delivery mesmerizing—yet, how should we applaud?

  DEATH WATCH

  As soon as the condemned man was brought into the room by prison guards, shackled at his wrists and ankles, breathing harshly, perspiring, yet with bright glistening eyes and a look of unnerving optimism, suggesting he was another convert to Christianity just in time to die, a terrible sense of desolation swept over me. I can’t do it. Not another time.

  I was a journalist; more than a journalist, a “conscience”; my column “Death Watch” appeared in a prominent newspaper with a national distribution; my responsibility lay upon me heavy as fate. Yet as in a nightmare made familiar and even numbing through repetition I foresaw that the “press conference” would be as mediocre as a segment from a TV movie; worse yet, the execution scheduled for midnight tonight would be mediocre, stale from repetition. It has all been performed before, by superior actors. I had flown from New York to Birmingham in the sulphurous heat of early September and I’d rented a budget car to drive sixty-eight miles to Hartsfree State Prison for Men, a maximum security facility that looked more or less as one might imagine, dour, drab, stereotypical with a twelve-foot concrete wall surrounding it, and by midafternoon I’d had nothing to eat except an airplane lunch with unspeakable red wine, and for what? Not all my skill as a writer or my outrage at the inhumanity of state-sanctioned murder could raise this sordid tale of the death of an individual named Ro
y Beale Birdsall beyond cliché and into the realm of metaphor, myth, poetry. Nothing so depressing as an execution in Alabama unless it’s an execution in Alabama following a coach class airplane lunch.

  It did hurt: When my writing assignments had been higher priority than the capital punishment beat, I’d flown first-class all the time. In the early days of “Deathwatch,” when my byline had sometimes appeared on the front page of the paper, to be syndicated across the country, I’d flown first-class with a double seat so that I could spread out my papers and work on the plane in a frenzy of inspiration. And I’d taken it as my due, the way a first-class journalist should be treated.

  Roy Beale Birdsall! Poor guy. Not knowing that Roy Beale Birdsall was a name that could never evoke tragedy. At the most, pathos. A hokey kind of trailer-park, country-and-western pathos already overexposed in the media. Almost I could have sworn I’d already written about Birdsall’s death in the luridly bright-yellow wooden electric chair still in use after decades at Hartsfree.

  I and a few other hardy journalists were here this afternoon because the Birdsall case was “controversial.” There had been irregularities in both of Birdsall’s trials; above all, a question about the man’s mental age, whether he’d been fully compos mentis in confessing to a double murder seven years ago. (The murders, crazed hackings with a long-handled ax, had been committed against neighbors of Birdsall’s in Parrish, Alabama; since Birdsall had been a parolee from a state prison at the time, convicted of theft and attempted arson, it had seemed reasonable for sheriff’s deputies to wake him in the middle of the night and question him. Things had gone rapidly downhill for Birdsall after that.) Birdsall had been a husky young nineteen-year-old pro wrestler just embarked upon his career at the time of his first arrest; in prison he’d metamorphosed into a fattish, hulking, hairless individual of thirty-nine with a wizened baby face like one of those hypnagogic images that rush at you when you’re falling to sleep in a state of extreme strain or exhaustion. His forehead was low, and broad; his eyes were eyes I’d seen before in the faces of the condemned: puppy-bright, shiny-brown, with a desperate hope of making eye contact with his visitors, so disappointingly few today, emissaries from the outside world. (There were only five of us. The last time I’d covered an execution at Hartsfree, two years ago, there must have been twelve media people at least; and, picketing at the front gate, a brave little band of anti-execution demonstrators led by a Dominican nun named Sister Mary Bonaventure whom I’d later profiled for one of my most effective “Death Watch” columns.)