Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  Though the Wilsons lived only one block from the Lakewood Country Club, they refused to join, leaving Claire and her four siblings to make the long walk to the municipal pool—which was also closed to blacks but at least welcomed their Jewish friends. Not wanting Claire, the eldest, to be oblivious to the injustices beyond their privileged, all-white enclave, her father drove her on more than one occasion through West Dallas, then home to a toxic lead smelter and slums that lacked sewage systems and running water. When she was twelve, her father took her to see Martin Luther King Jr. speak at the Majestic Theater in Fort Worth, where few whites were present; at a private reception afterward, he led her up to the young minister to shake his hand.

  At the time, in the late fifties, the unspoken rules of segregated society seemed immutable to Claire. When her parents went out to dinner one night with a black couple they knew, she watched, frozen, as the four drove off in her parents’ Cadillac, convinced they would all be murdered. By the time she was a teenager, however, she had grown impatient with the pace of change. Each day for a month during the summer of 1964, she donned a dress, hat, and white gloves and headed downtown with her mother to take part in the protests outside the Piccadilly Cafeteria, a popular restaurant that refused service to blacks. Claire was arrested and booked into the city jail, but the charges were dismissed. She was ridiculed for being a “nigger lover” when she returned that fall to Woodrow Wilson High School, an epithet she doubled down on when she spent the following summer in the Mississippi Delta working as a volunteer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So immersed did she become in the SNCC’s effort to get black residents registered to vote that she stayed on until October, content to miss her senior year.

  Late that fall, she ran into John Muir, an acquaintance who had come home to Dallas unexpectedly from his sophomore year at Columbia University. Muir was wrestling with whether to drop out of college and devote himself to the civil rights movement. A graduate of the elite St. Mark’s School of Texas, Muir was charismatic and well read, and though he was white, he had served as vice president of the local NAACP Youth Council. Claire had gotten to know him during the summer of the Piccadilly protest, when a multiracial group of teen activists had regularly gathered at her parents’ house. During those unhurried afternoons, Muir had introduced her to the works of E. E. Cummings and Joseph Heller and played her the first Bob Dylan album she had ever heard, but it was not until Christmas week in 1965, after Claire had returned from Mississippi, that they slept together.

  Muir decided to return to Columbia after the holidays, but first he agreed to help Claire move to Austin. Her parents, whose marriage had been foundering for years, had recently divorced, and she saw no compelling reason to stay in Dallas. Before long, Claire had landed a job waiting tables in her new city and enrolled for night classes at Austin High. She felt at home in the sleepy capital, a place of cheap rent, psychedelic rock, and nascent political activism. Her involvement in the civil rights movement quickly won her respect and friends, and she fell in with a group of like-minded UT students who were ablaze with new ideas.

  It was in the midst of this happy-go-lucky time—when she was finally free from the judgments of racist classmates and the near-constant threat of violence she had felt in Mississippi—that Claire discovered she was pregnant. Muir dutifully made a trip to Austin after she told him the news, but during their discussions about how to move forward, he never suggested they make a life together. While she had no desire to get married, Claire felt bruised by the rejection. Muir returned to Columbia, leaving behind the then-considerable sum of $200 so she could have an abortion.

  On the advice of friends, Claire met with a woman who knew how to procure the illegal—and, at that time, often perilous—procedure. But she could not bring herself to go any further. Though her decision to keep the baby would have meant certain exile from most social circles, in her group of free-thinking friends, her pregnancy was of little concern. Privately, the idea of having a child thrilled her, but it was not until she met Tom that May that someone shared in her joy.

  “I was really, truly happy for the first time in my life,” Claire told me. “I was out on my own, and I was in love, and I had so many friends. We were revolutionizing the world, and Tom and I were at the front of it.”

  Whitman hit his targets with terrifying precision. Across a crime scene that spanned five city blocks, the former marine sharpshooter managed to strike his intended victims with ease, felling them from distances well beyond 500 yards. His arsenal included a scoped 6mm Remington bolt-action rifle; a .35-caliber pump rifle; a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver; a .30-caliber M1 carbine; a 9mm Luger pistol; a Galesi-Brescia .25-caliber pistol; a 12-gauge shotgun with a sawed-off barrel; and about seven hundred rounds of ammunition. His rampage dragged on for more than an hour and a half before Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy reached him on the Tower’s observation deck and shot him dead. By the time it was all over, Whitman had succeeded in killing 16 people and wounding 31.

  Claire’s rescuers miraculously avoided being hit as they ran headlong toward the western edge of the mall, spiriting her to the shelter of the Jefferson Davis statue. From there, five bystanders took over, carrying her to Inner Campus Drive, where they loaded her into a waiting ambulance.

  She would be one of 39 gunshot victims delivered to Brackenridge Hospital’s emergency room in the span of 90 minutes. Many of them were bleeding out quickly, and doctors and nurses shouted back and forth as they tried to discern who should be sent into surgery first. Claire and a 17-year-old high school student named Karen Griffith, who had been shot in the lung, were lying on gurneys beside each other, waiting to be X-rayed, when a doctor intervened. “There’s no time for X-rays,” he yelled, directing his staff to prep them both for surgery.

  Claire was still conscious when a medic began cutting off her blood-soaked dress, and she begged him to stop, not wanting to lose the garment Tom had picked out for her. Though she clung to the delusion that she had only been shot in the arm, her magical thinking did not extend to Tom, whom she felt certain was dead. She had seen his inert body as she was lifted away.

  Claire was put under general anesthetic, and her doctors set to work. The full extent of the damage was not evident until they made a lengthy incision down her torso, from sternum to pubic bone. The bullet had torn into her left side just above the hip, splintering the tip of her pelvis, puncturing her small intestine and uterus, lacerating an ovary, and riddling her internal organs with shrapnel. A C-section was performed, but the baby—a boy—was stillborn. A bullet fragment had pierced his skull.

  The operation took twelve hours. Not long after Claire regained consciousness, she was wheeled down a corridor to the ICU. Standing along the walls on either side were her friends, who had waited at the hospital until past midnight to learn if she had made it out of surgery. “We love you, Claire!” they called out.

  She spent the next seven weeks in the ICU in a fog of Demerol and Darvon. All told, she would endure five operations at Brackenridge to repair the damage done to her. To distract herself from the pain, she would belt out protest songs from her bed, delivering renditions of “Which Side Are You On?” and “We Shall Overcome” at the top of her lungs. With no TVs or even visitors, besides family members, allowed inside the ICU, she had few distractions and little information about life outside Brackenridge. Despite being a victim in a tragedy that had made headlines around the world, she never saw or heard a single news report about the shooting.

  Her life narrowed to her hospital bed and the green floor-to-ceiling curtains the nurses drew tightly around her, past which she could sometimes catch sight of a tree and a sliver of sky. Intravenous lines extended from all four of her limbs, and her left leg, which was in traction, was suspended above her. Every two hours, in an excruciating ritual she came to dread, a nurse would turn her, rolling her onto one side and then the other. Her mother, who tried to project an image of strength, oft
en sat at her bedside, chatting with the doctors and offering Claire words of encouragement. Refusing to give in to the chaos that the shooting had wrought, she was always immaculately dressed, often wearing a two-piece knit suit from Neiman Marcus, her blond hair pulled into a French twist.

  If Claire’s mother or her doctors ever explicitly told her that her baby was stillborn, she struck it from her memory. No one, as far as she could recall, ever spoke aloud the fact that her child had died. That the baby was a boy and that a burial plot had been secured for him were the only details she gleaned. Claire did not ask questions because she already knew; she felt his absence. She was startled when her milk came in days after the C-section, leaving her breasts engorged, and relieved when it dried up and her baby weight fell away. Her body settled back into its old contours, her belly flat, as if the pregnancy had never happened.

  Without the chance to hold the baby in her arms, Claire did not know how to mourn his loss; she had not yet chosen a name, and he felt like an abstraction, his face unknowable. But her grief for Tom, and their abbreviated summer together, only metastasized once the fall semester got under way. She was tormented by the fact that she had not been able to attend his funeral. “I learned more in those [months with Tom] than perhaps in any other period of my life,” she wrote in a four-page condolence letter to his father. “The sort of things that were between Tom and me happen so rarely in this world that most people don’t even understand the language.”

  Most of the shooting victims who had been admitted to Brackenridge were discharged; some, like Karen Griffith, did not survive. Only Claire stayed on, her presence noted every now and then in the local paper, which ran a two-sentence squib on September 16 announcing that she was the last of Whitman’s victims to remain hospitalized.

  The myriad complications of abdominal gunshot wounds, including the threat of infection and sepsis, made Claire’s condition tenuous. By the time her surgeries were complete, several feet of her intestine had been removed, as well as an ovary and the iliac crest of her pelvic bone. Daily physical therapy sessions allowed her to gradually regain the ability to walk. After she was moved out of the ICU, she became adept at using a cane, and at night, when she was unable to sleep, she would maneuver her way to the nurses’ station to visit with the women in starched white uniforms who cared for her, some of whom were not much older than she was.

  Claire was finally released the first week of November. She was 19 by then, though she felt a thousand years old. She returned to campus in January, and in the early spring, she made the first of several visits to the library to page through the August 12 issue of Life. She had no pictures of Tom, and though the yearbook photo featured in the magazine failed to capture his spirit, she liked to study it all the same.

  The confirmation she sought about the massacre—that she had not dreamed or invented it—was muddled by the fact that Life, like most publications at the time, omitted her preterm baby from the official tally of the dead. And so rather than avoid the South Mall on her way to class each day, she purposely walked past the spot where she and Tom had been hit, intensely curious, as if her proximity to the crime scene would render it more vivid. When the Tower’s observation deck was reopened that June, she visited it by herself, riding the elevator to the 27th floor and then taking three short flights of stairs to the top, just as Whitman had with his arsenal. She looked over the balustrade down at the mall, as he had, and crouched down to peer through the downspouts where he had rested the barrel of his gun.

  Austin was a place that had brought her so much happiness, but as she surveyed campus and the city that spread out beyond it, she felt an overwhelming sense of dislocation. How would she ever recover from the enormity of her loss, she wondered, or navigate the years ahead? “I was so lonely and so longing for some sort of physical contact,” Claire said. “All I wanted right then was for somebody to put their arms around me and hold me tight.”

  [ III ]

  Ten years after the shooting, on a warm July afternoon in 1976, Claire stood in a phone booth in northern Colorado, not far from the rugged peaks of the Continental Divide, with the receiver pressed to one ear. She had agreed to speak to an Austin American-Statesman reporter named Brenda Bell who was interviewing survivors of the shooting for an article that would mark its 10-year anniversary. With the help of Claire’s father, Bell had tracked Claire down in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, outside the small town of Loveland. Claire had never spoken about the shooting publicly, and her voice was soft as she answered the reporter’s questions.

  After she had been shot, she told Bell, she was “basically mixed up—confused about life in general.” Only once she started reading the Bible in the years that followed had she found some peace. Scripture, she explained, “started effecting a lot of changes in my life.” She had found a group of Seventh-day Adventists who worked as medical missionaries around Loveland, where they tried “to help other young people physically, mentally, and spiritually,” she said. Her time there, immersed in nature and the gospel, had been restorative. “I’m so thankful,” she told Bell before she hung up. “I’m glad to be alive.”

  Claire had spent five years living and working at the Eden Valley Institute, a spiritual retreat accessible only by unpaved roads and bounded by jaw-dropping panoramas of the snow-capped Rockies. Its clean-living, Adventist doctrine rejected not just smoking, drinking, and sex outside marriage but also the distractions of popular culture. In an era defined by the loosening of social mores, it was a monastic existence; Claire did not watch the evening news, listen to the radio, or go to the movie theater. While some women worked on the institute’s farm, which yielded much of their food, or helped with the cooking and childcare, her main occupation was teaching the residents’ school-age children. (Her father approvingly told her on his first visit that the self-sustaining community was “the closest thing to Red China” he had ever seen.) Though newspapers could be found at Eden Valley, Claire steered clear of them, preferring to spend her free time taking long walks through the backcountry. She was unaware of the Watergate hearings or the fall of Saigon. “It was very healing to be way out, deep in the mountains, apart from the rest of the world,” Claire told me.

  She had tried at first to heal herself in more conventional ways, visiting UT’s University Health Services as early as 1967 for the talk therapy she believed she urgently needed. But after her first session, during which she felt that the psychologist had made a pass at her, Claire abandoned the idea. At her father’s urging, she transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder that fall, leaving the near-constant reminders of the shooting behind, but she was homesick there, and she returned to UT the following year.

  To her friends, she had seemed fine—“Nice and sunny,” recalled one—but not long after her return, she landed at the student health center again when she abruptly stopped eating. The psychiatrist who evaluated her, Claire thought, showed more interest in her admission that she had taken LSD before than in her obvious depression. He put her on Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic, and though her hair began falling out and she struggled to concentrate in class, her treatment was not adjusted. “Questioning doctors was just not done then, so I was an obedient patient,” she told me. “There never was any talk therapy. He only wanted to discuss my past drug experiences, which were so few.” In 1969, at the end of her spring semester, she dropped out and moved back to Colorado.

  It was that same year that Claire began to feel the stirrings of belief. “After the shooting, I’d started wondering what forces were at work in the universe,” she said. “I felt strongly that there was a force I couldn’t see, and I was interested in finding out what it was.” She escaped to the mountains outside Boulder with a University of Colorado student named Ernie, with whom she lived in a rough-hewn house in the woods with no indoor heat or plumbing. They immersed themselves in nature and back-to-basics living, warming themselves by a coal stove and hauling water from a well.

  Just d
own the road from them and the other hippies who had taken up residence in Lefthand Canyon was an 82-year-old woman named Emma Spencer, whom her neighbors called “Ma.” A Seventh-day Adventist, she grew her own food, wove rugs by hand, and strictly observed the Sabbath. To Claire, the child of nonbelievers, she was a source of fascination. Ma gave her a Bible, which she began to read, and one afternoon, Claire found herself kneeling in prayer beside the older woman, searching for words as she tried to communicate with God. She had cried for Tom many times, but as she knelt on the knobby rag rug in Ma’s log cabin, she felt, as she would later recall, an “unbidden and unexpected” grief surface for the baby. For the first time, Claire began to weep for her lost son.

  Her desire for “a sincere, authentic, Christian life,” as she called it, took her to Eden Valley in 1971. She would remain there until she was thirty, not striking out on her own until the winter of 1977. Her friends in Texas and Colorado, who heard from her infrequently during this time, if at all, were stunned that the girl they knew, who delighted in skinny-dipping and challenging the status quo, had suddenly gotten religion. “I don’t know what combination of PTSD, spiritual yearning—which was very much of the moment—depression, and epiphany led her to the strict regime of the Seventh-day Adventist utopia,” observed Tim Coursey, a childhood friend. “But I do remember thinking, ‘Well, how about that? She walked right through the looking glass.’”

  The dream, which Claire first had in her twenties, always began the same way: she would look down and discover her baby, bright-eyed, in her arms. He was never as small as a newborn—he would be a few months old, perhaps, or a toddler, even, old enough to meet her gaze—and she would be flooded with relief as she stared back at him in wonder. Then she would glance away, or walk into another room, her attention wandering for no more than a second, and when she looked back, her son would be gone.