An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  “Why didn’t you?” O’Brien went on.

  “It would have been disagreeable if Deborah found out.”

  “That makes sense,” said O’Brien.

  “All right,” said Roberts, “you came into this room, and then what?”

  “We talked for hours. We drank and we talked.”

  “Less than half the bottle is gone. That’s not much for two heavy drinkers over three hours.”

  “Deborah had her share. I only took nips.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Everything. We discussed the possibility of getting together again. We agreed it was impossible. Then she cried, which is very rare for Deborah. She told me that she had spent an hour standing by the open window before I came, and that she had been tempted to jump. She felt as if God were asking her. She said she felt a woe afterward as if she’d refused Him. And then she said, ‘I didn’t have cancer before. But in that hour I stood by the window, it began in me. I didn’t jump and so my cells jumped. I know that.’ Those were her words. Then she fell asleep for a while.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just sat in this chair by her bed. I felt pretty low, I can tell you. Then she woke up. She asked me to open the window. When she started to talk, she told me … do I really have to go into this?”

  “Better if you would.”

  “She told me my mother had had cancer and I had had it too, and that I gave it to her. She said all the years we were lying in bed as husband and wife I was giving it to her.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Something equally ugly.”

  “Please go into it,” said Roberts.

  “I said that was just as well, because she was a parasite and I had work to do. I even said: if her soul were dying, it deserved to, it was vicious.”

  “What did she do then?”

  “She got out of bed and went over to the window, and said, ‘If you don’t retract that, I’ll jump.’ I was confident she didn’t mean it. Her very use of a word like ‘retract.’ I simply told her, ‘Well, then jump. Rid the world of your poison.’ I thought I was doing the right thing, that I might be breaking into her madness, into that tyrannical will which had wrecked our marriage. I thought I might win something decisive with her. Instead, she took a step on the ledge, and out she went. And I felt as if something blew back from her as she fell and brushed against my face.” I began to shudder; the picture I had given was real to me. “Then I don’t know what happened. I think I was half ready to follow her. Obviously I didn’t. Instead I called the police, and called down to the maid, and then I must have passed out for a moment because I came to lying on the floor, and thought, ‘You’re guilty of her death.’ So go slow for a while, will you, Roberts. This has not been easy.”

  “Yeah,” said Roberts. “I think I believe you.”

  “Excuse me,” said O’Brien. He got up just a bit heavily and went out.

  “There’s a few formalities,” said Roberts. “If you can take it, I’d like you to come down to Four Hundred East Twenty-ninth for the identification, and then we’ll go over to the precinct and check out a few forms.”

  “I hope I don’t have to tell this story too many times.”

  “Just once more to a police stenographer. You can skip all the details. No hell, heaven, cancer, nothing like that. None of the dialogue. Just that you saw her go.”

  O’Brien came back with another detective who was introduced as Lieutenant Leznicki. He was Polish. He was about Roberts’ height, even thinner than Roberts, and looked to have an angry ulcer, for he moved with short irritable gestures. His eyes were a dull yellow-gray in color, and about the tint of a stale clam. His hair was an iron-gray and his skin was gray. He must have been fifty years old. Just as we were introduced, he sniffed the air with a boxer’s quick snort. Then he smiled irritably.

  “Why’d you kill her, Rojack?” he asked.

  “What’s up?” said Roberts.

  “Her hyoid bone is broken.” Leznicki looked at me. “Why didn’t you say you strangled her before you threw her out?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “The doctor’s evidence shows you strangled her.”

  “I don’t believe it. My wife fell ten stories and then was struck by a car.”

  Roberts sat back. I looked to him as if he were the first ally and last best friend I had in the world, and he leaned forward and said, “Mr. Rojack, we handle a lot of suicides in a year. They take pills, they cut their wrists, they stick a pistol in their mouth. Sometimes they jump. But in all the years I’ve been on the Force, I never heard of a woman jumping from an open window while her husband was watching.”

  “Never,” said O’Brien.

  “You better get yourself a lawyer, buddy,” said Leznicki.

  “I don’t need one.”

  “Come on,” said Roberts, “let’s go over to the precinct.”

  As they stood up, I was aware of a mood which came from them. It was the smell of hunters sitting in an overheated hut at dawn waiting for the sun to come out, drunk from drinking through the night. I was game to them at this moment. As I stood up, I felt a weakness go through me. No adrenalin followed. I had been taking more punishment than I thought and had the same sense of surprise a fighter knows in the middle of a fight when his legs go mellow and there is nothing left in his arms.

  When they took me through the hall, Ruta was nowhere in sight. I could hear voices however in her room.

  “The specialists get here yet?” asked Leznicki of the policeman on guard at the door.

  “That’s them in there,” said the cop.

  “Tell them I said to give one hundred percent to this job, and one hundred percent to the job upstairs.”

  Then he rang for the elevator.

  “Why don’t we take him through the back door,” said Roberts.

  “No,” said Leznicki, “let him meet The Press.”

  They were downstairs on the street, about eight or ten of them, and they did an odd dance about us, their flashbulbs going off, their questions flying, their faces overcheerful and greedy. They could have been a pack of twelve-year-old beggars in some Italian town, hysterical, almost wild, delighted with the money they might be thrown, and in a whinny of fear they would get nothing. I made no attempt to cover my face—at the moment there seemed no harm worse than to have to look at myself tomorrow in a tabloid with my head humped behind a hat.

  “Hey, Leznicki, he do it?” one cried.

  Another darted up to me, his face full of welcome, as if to give surety he was the one man on the street I could trust. “Would you care to make a statement, Mr. Rojack?” he asked with concern.

  “No, nothing,” I said.

  Roberts was guiding me into the back seat.

  “Hey, Roberts,” another cried, “what’s the word?”

  “Suicide or what?” asked another.

  “Routine,” said Roberts, “routine.”

  There was a low undertone of bickering, not unlike the sound an audience gives off when it is announced the understudy will play the part tonight. “Let’s get going,” said Roberts.

  But he sat in front beside the driver, while I was plumped into the back cushions between Leznicki and O’Brien. We were driving now in an unmarked battered sedan, a detective’s car, and as we took off from the curb, more flash bulbs went off through the window at me, and I could hear them scrambling for their cars.

  “Why’d you do it?” asked Leznicki in my ear.

  I didn’t answer. I did my best to stare back, as if I were in fact a husband who had watched his wife go out a window and he was no more than some animal barking at me, but my silence must have been livid, because an odor of violence came off him, a kind of clammy odor of rut, and O’Brien, on my other side, who had shown a pronounced smell already, oversweet and very stale, was throwing a new odor, something like the funk a bully emits when he heads for a face-to-face meeting. Their hands twitched in their laps. They wanted to have a go a
t me. I had a feeling I wouldn’t last thirty seconds between them.

  “Did you use a stocking to strangle her?” asked Leznicki.

  “He used his arm,” said O’Brien in a big hollow gloomy voice.

  It had started to rain. A light fall, almost a mist, settled in a delicate wash of light over the streets. I could feel my heart beating now like a canary held in my hand. It throbbed with a tender almost exhilarated fatigue; I could have been no more than a drum with a bird’s heart trapped inside, and the reverberations seemed to sound outside my body, as if everyone in the car could hear me. There were cars following behind, the photographers and the reporters no doubt, and their headlights gave an odd comfort. Like a bird indeed in a cage in a darkened room, the passing flare of light from outside gave some memory of the forest, and I felt myself soaring out on the beating of my heart as if a climax of fear had begun which might race me through swells of excitement until everything burst, the heart burst, and I flew out to meet my death. The men in the car looked red to me, then green, then red again. I wondered if I were close to fainting. It was suffocating to sit between those men—it was like being a fox in a bog while hounds crooned on either bank. I knew at last the sweet panic of an animal who is being tracked, for if danger were close, if danger came in on the breeze, and one’s nostrils had an awareness of the air as close as that first touch of a tongue on your flesh, there was still such a tenderness for the hope one could stay alive. Something came out of the city like the whispering of a forest, and on the March night’s message through the open window I had at that instant the first smell of spring, that quiet instant, so like the first moment of love one feels in a woman who has until then given no love.

  “Going to marry the maid after you grab your wife’s dough?” asked Leznicki.

  “You strangled her.” O’Brien said in his hollow voice. “Why’d you strangle her?”

  “Roberts,” I asked, “can you call off these hoodlums?”

  There was one instant in which they both came so close to hitting me that I felt a wave of frustration fly out from Leznicki’s hand and move across my face with the small impact of a flashlight in the eye. They sat there, their hands on their thighs, shaking, Leznicki with the muscular beat of a piston and O’Brien quivering like a sea-jelly disturbed in its ooze.

  “You say that again,” said Leznicki, “and I’ll give you a pistol-whipping. You’ve been put on warning now.”

  “Don’t threaten me, friend.”

  “Let it go,” said Roberts to all of us. “Knock it off.”

  I sat back, feeling the damage I had done. Now the adrenalin was going through their body like a mob in a riot.

  We went the rest of the way in silence. Their bodies were so heated with anger that my skin felt the kind of burn one knows from staying too long beside an ultraviolet-ray lamp.

  We were at the morgue for only a few minutes. There was a walk down a corridor with an attendant unlocking the doors for us, and then the room with sheets over two cadavers lying on stainless-steel tables and a bank of refrigerated bins where the bodies were kept. The light had a color like the underbelly of a whale, that denuded white of fluorescent tubes, and there was now new silence, a dead silence, some stretch of the void with no sense of events beneath, just a silence of the waste. My nostrils hurt from the antiseptic and deodorant and the other smell (that vile pale scent of embalming fluid and fecal waters) insinuated its way through the stricken air. I did not want to look at Deborah this time. I took no more than a glimpse when the sheet was laid back, and caught for that act a clear view of one green eye staring open, hard as marble, dead as the dead eye of a fish, and her poor face swollen, her beauty gone obese.

  “Can we get out of here?” I asked.

  The attendant put the sheet back with a professional turn of his wrists, casual but slow, not without ceremony. He had the cheerful formal gloom of a men’s room attendant. “The doctor’ll be here in five minutes. You going to wait?” he asked.

  “Tell him to call us at the precinct,” said Leznicki.

  In a corner, on a desk, at the end of this long room, I could see a very small television set about the size of a table radio. It was turned down low and had gone out of synchronization, for the picture was flaring bright, then dark, then flaring up again, and I had the insane clarity to recognize that it was speaking to the neon tubes and they were answering back. I was close to nausea. When we quit the corridors and left the hospital, I turned to one side and tried to throw up but produced no more than a taste of some bile and the intimate lightning of a photographer taking a picture.

  On the way to the precinct, we were silent again. Whatever Deborah would deserve, that morgue was not the place for her. I had a reverie of my own death then, and my soul (some time in the future) was trying to lift and loose itself of the body which had died. It was a long process, as if a membrane trapped in mud were seeking to catch a breeze which would trip it free. In that morgue (for that was where I pictured my own death) the delicate filaments of my soul were also expiring in a paralysis of deodorant while hope withered in the dialogue between the neon tube and the television set. I felt guilty for the first time. It was a crime to have pushed Deborah into the morgue.

  There were more photographers and reporters at the entrance to the precinct, and again they were all shouting and talking out at once. “Did he do it?” I heard one yell. “You holding him?” cried another. “What’s the pitch, Roberts, what’s the pitch?” They came in behind us and then were left as we passed through the Desk Sergeant’s room where a cop was sitting high up on that square raised desk which had always reminded me of a tribunal (but it was only in movies I had ever seen this desk before) and then we passed into a larger room, a very large room, perhaps sixty feet by forty feet, the walls painted a dark institutional green up to the height of one’s eyes and then a dirty worn-down institutional tan all the way up to the dirty-white tin plates of the ceiling, those eighteen-inch-square cheap tin plates, each decorated with some nineteenth-century manufacturer’s impression of a fleur-de-lis. I saw nothing but desks, twenty desks perhaps, and beyond, two small rooms. Roberts stopped by the door between the Desk Sergeant’s room and this large room, and made a short speech to the reporters. “We’re not holding Mr. Rojack for anything. He’s just accommodating us by coming here to answer questions.” Then he shut the door.

  Roberts led me to a desk. We sat down. He took out a folder and wrote in it for a few minutes. Then he looked up. We were alone again. Leznicki and O’Brien had disappeared somewhere. “You’re aware,” said Roberts, “that I did you a favor out there.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, it was against my better judgment. I don’t like the feel of this one. Neither does Leznicki or O’Brien. I’m going to tell you: Leznicki is an animal when it comes to this sort of stuff. He’s convinced you killed her. He thinks you broke her hyoid bone with a silk stocking wrapped around her neck. He’s hoping you did it a couple of hours before you pushed her out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, friend, if she was gone for a couple of hours, it could show up in the autopsy.”

  “If it does, you have a case.”

  “Oh, we have the beginnings of a case. I have a nose for one thing. I know you were making out with that German maid.” His hard blue eyes looked into me. I held the stare until my eyes began to water. Then he looked away. “Rojack, you’re lucky nobody got hurt too much in that five-car crack-up. If they had, and we could stick your wife’s fall on you, the papers would handle you as Bluebeard, Jr. I mean think if a kid had been killed.”

  Indeed, I had never considered this until now. It had not been part of my intent after all to telescope five cars on the East River Drive.

  “So, look,” he went on, “you’re not in the worst of spots. But you are at the point where you have to make a decision. If you confess this—forgive your feelings—but if you have any infidelities on your wife’s part to bring in as evidence, a smart
lawyer could get you off with twenty years. Which as a practical matter is usually about twelve years and can be as little as eight. We’ll cooperate to the extent that we’ll say your confession was given us of your own free will. I’ll have to mark down the time of it which will mean you didn’t confess for the first few hours, but I’ll say you were in shock up to then. I won’t mention the kind of bullshit you’ve given us. And I’ll stand up for you in court. Whereas if you wait till all the evidence accumulates, and then confess, you’ll get life. Then, even at best, you won’t be out for twenty years. And if you fight it all the way, and we get a lock on the case, you could face the chair, buddy. They’ll shave your head and give your soul a charge of voltage. So sit on this, and think. Think of that electric chair. I’m getting some coffee.”

  “It’s way after midnight,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be home by now?”

  “I’ll bring you a cup.”

  But I was sorry he was gone. It had been easier somehow when he had been there. Now there was nothing to do but think of what he had said. I was trying to calculate how much time had gone by from that moment I recognized Deborah was dead until she struck the ground on the East River Drive. It could not be less than half an hour. It could be as much as an hour, conceivably an hour and a half. I had had a knowledge of anatomy once, but now I had no idea how long the cells might remain intact, nor how soon they might begin to decompose. While I was sitting here, it was likely they were doing an autopsy on Deborah. A leaden anxiety settled in my stomach; just that sort of bottomless pit I used to feel when I had been away from Deborah for a week or two and was suddenly powerless not to call her. It was difficult to sit still and wait for Roberts to come back, much as if that merciless lack of charity which I had come to depend on in Deborah (as a keel to ballast the empty dread of my stomach) was now provided by the detective. I knew they were probably watching me, and that I should not move too much; I was aware that once I began to walk about, my anxiety would show in every step I took, and yet I did not know if I could expend much more of my will in remaining motionless: I had been firing guns for hours—the armory was near to empty.