Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  David was too young to have any memories of the year or so spent at the Molly Pitcher Village Apartments, but it was probably here that he was hit by a car and broke his leg. His lifelong fascination with creeping crawling things was already apparent. Pat recalled that he once brought dozens of caterpillars into the apartment in a paper bag. They were in the curtains. On the chairs. “You could just scoop them up,” said Pat. He would also pick up big black ants and eat them.

  Ed did not contest the divorce, which was granted in June 1957, but he’d been petitioning the court since the beginning of that year to get more time with his children. With the court’s permission, he took them to his relatives in Michigan for the month of August 1957. A couple of months later, he sued for custody, even though he was seldom home. He told the court that he would place the children either with his mother in Detroit or in an institution in New Jersey. Meanwhile, Dolores had converted to Methodism and was unhappy with the court’s order that she raise the children as Catholics. In January 1958, the court ruled that it could not decide a religious difference of opinion between parents and a month later confirmed that Dolores had custody, again ordering Ed to pay seventy-five dollars a week in alimony and child support.

  For reasons none of the children understood, Dolores placed them in what David, then three years old, later called “either an orphanage or boarding home.” It was the latter, but clearly felt like the former, and Dolores may have taken them there within weeks of getting custody. At least, that would be Ed’s claim, and she never rebutted it. All three children hated this home, their memories differing only on which religion they were force-fed. The woman who ran the place with her teenage son was strict and abusive. Pat said that when kids misbehaved, “she would take a thorn branch, smack their butts,” and that they had to sit by the piano every Sunday and sing hymns because the woman was Baptist. Steven hated the food, was thrown into cold showers for bed-wetting, and remembered spending every Saturday night reading Scripture because the woman was Jewish. David recalled a lack of food, cold showers, beatings, and standing at attention for hours while the woman played piano. Dolores came to visit on weekends, according to Pat. David remembered just one visit—when he followed Dolores outside to a waiting taxi to tell her how awful the place was, and Dolores replied that there was nothing she could do. Steven thought their father visited more than their mother did. Ed would usually take them to stay with him at a hotel for the weekend.

  In September 1958, just before David’s fourth birthday, Dolores applied to the court for permission to move the children to New York City. She’d been commuting back and forth, she said, looking for work as a model. And she asked that Ed be held in contempt of court because he hadn’t paid any support since March. Ed’s reply was that Dolores had “abandoned” the children in March and that she’d been “gainfully employed” since April—so he’d decided to send her just sixty dollars a week, the kids’ share. According to Ed, she was already living in New York City, which would explain why the children weren’t just in daycare but boarded full-time.

  The court never had a chance to adjudicate on any of these claims. On November 9, Ed kidnapped his children. He showed up at the boarding home during one of his visitation weekends, told them to pack their bags because he was taking them to stay at the shore, and soon they were all on a plane to Detroit. Before they boarded, however, Ed called Dolores from the airport to tell her that the children wanted to live with him on a farm. Directed, no doubt, by her father, Pat then got on the phone to reiterate, “I want to live with Daddy on a farm.” Years later, Pat still felt guilty about possibly saying such a thing. (Pat didn’t recall doing this, but Dolores told her later that she had, and that it broke her heart.) In December, the court issued a warrant for Ed’s arrest.

  An important unstated point about the kidnapping is that Dolores would have known exactly where her children were going. Ed’s sister Jean lived on a Michigan farm. That’s where Ed had taken the children for the previous summer’s court-approved vacation. That’s where the family had always vacationed.

  Ed’s roots were in Michigan. He’d grown up in Hamtramck, a city that was completely surrounded by Detroit and, during his youth, mostly Polish. Ed’s parents were immigrants. His father committed suicide during the Depression—by drinking ammonia, or so Ed eventually told Steven. Ed began working on a banana truck shortly after that. Working and drinking. He’d been eight years old. Ed brought Dolores to Michigan after they married, and Pat was born there. By the 1950s, most of the Wojnarowiczes had moved to Dearborn. But Michigan was not a convenient location for a merchant seaman. Ed moved his family to New Jersey after Pat was born in 1950. By the time he kidnapped the children and fled back to Michigan, he was working as an assistant engineer on the S.S. United States.

  None of the children remembered when the kidnapping occurred. (The November ’58 date comes from court records.) When David created the “Biographical Dateline” for his retrospective, “Tongues of Flame,” he placed it a year earlier, in 1957: “Ended up with distant relatives on a chicken farm.” His aunt and uncle. Distant? But then, David never felt much connection with his extended family or took any interest in his ancestry. He also had an imperfect sense of time, often situating events in the wrong year in his own account of his life.

  Pat and Steven both said they’d lived mostly in Dearborn after the kidnapping—with their grandmother and Ed’s two unmarried siblings, Helen and John. A few undated snapshots exist, with the children posed outside a small brick house. Here we get the first faint intimations of the menace Ed later became to his kids. Steven remembered Uncle Johnny intervening: “Eddie, that’s enough. I’m not going to let you beat ’em.” Or, “Eddie, that’s enough. Leave ’em alone.” And Pat still thought of Uncle Johnny as her hero. “He would stick up for me,” she said, though she couldn’t remember how.

  Nor could either of them remember how long they were in Michigan or when they returned to New Jersey. Pat knows for sure that she attended school in Michigan—because it was a Catholic boarding school she hated. Then one day, Ed returned from one of his sailing trips with a woman he introduced as their new mother. This was Moira Banks—known as Marion—a native of Scotland who’d been working as a nanny on Long Island. She’d met Ed on the ship while returning to New York from a visit with her family. She was two years younger than Dolores and, like her, had no family support or resources in this country.

  The children spent, at most, a year in Michigan. In 1959, David appeared in a class picture at the Dryden Street School in Westbury, Long Island, with a Thanksgiving mural on the wall behind him. And his half-brother, Pete, was born there in December. After David published his Dateline, he was surprised to learn from his sister that they’d once lived on Long Island. He thought they’d been in New Jersey the whole time. But then, the geography of childhood had been something of a blur for them all. None of them could remember the names of all the schools they’d attended.

  They didn’t live on the Island for long. Ed didn’t like it there. So in 1960, he moved the family back to New Jersey, renting in Parlin at 3108 Bordentown Avenue. Their one-story house was part of a long row all built from the same blueprint, like unlinked boxcars on a track. The area was just developing then, still farm country. And here David begins to come into focus as an individual. He made trips alone into the woods to look for critters. He found a kid who’d give him three dollars for a frog. He developed a risky game with a friend: lying down on busy Bordentown Avenue, just beyond the crest of a hill, so semitrailer trucks nosing over the top would suddenly have to hit the brakes while David and his friend got up and ran away.

  David’s half-sister, Linda—Ed’s fifth child—was born in August ’61 while they were living in Parlin. Soon after, Ed bought his first house, a split-level with a one-car garage at 9 Huntington Road in nearby East Brunswick. Here David lived until he left New Jersey for good.

  In 1990, before he published Close to the Knives, his “memoir of
disintegration,” David called his sister and said he needed her to sign a permission form, agreeing to let him report “the private facts concerning her abuse,” as the Random House legal department put it. David had included a story about their father picking her up and slamming her to the ground, then kicking her, while “brown stuff” came out of her ears and mouth. Pat had no memory of this—which David found shocking—but she signed the paper, thinking it could easily have been an incident she forgot. Or blocked out. “Because there was so much violence going on,” she explained.

  Still, Pat tried to emphasize the positive when possible. She had some memories from Huntington Road when her father “could be OK. And we weren’t scared.” That’s when Ed was sober. But it seemed that he was rarely sober. Ed was an alcoholic who would never hit bottom, who would just keep falling. And when he was home, the family lived in a state of terror.

  Steven remembered a kind of physical intensity their father had: how his lips would curl and spit would come out of his mouth, how the look in his eye said he wanted to kill, how—quite apart from the physical pain—he inflicted psychological pain that Steven thought more severe. He’d wave a beer can, demanding, “Know what I’m gonna do with this?” till Steven assumed that he was going to get it jammed down his throat, and then Ed would say, “I’m gonna drink it.” He’d go into a tirade, telling them how worthless they were, how stupid, how like a seagull. (“All you do is eat, shit, and squawk.”) He loved to lecture. He’d ramble through “the same old hunting story of how he caught a deer,” as Pat put it. “You had to sit there for hours. You’d just die.” He’d lash out if a kid’s attention wavered. During one of these interminable sessions, Steven dared to scratch his legs, only to have his father pick up a jar of pickles and heave it at him.

  Then there were the beatings. David usually didn’t go into specifics apart from “got beat,” but Pat and Steven both recalled their father using his fists, or his belt, or a stick, or a dog leash, or a two-by-four. He never broke their bones, said Pat, but they would be black and blue, and afraid for their lives. Steven felt he was treated differently by their father—treated worse—because he was the big boy, chubby and growing fast. (Eventually David would be taller than any of them, at six feet four, but he was both short and scrawny during the Jersey years.) Steven remembered bleeding from his eyes, ears, and nose, then being sent to the market with lips swollen “out to here” and people staring but not inquiring. Years later, David would say that he felt compelled to tell the Real Deal in his work because he never forgot the way the neighbors averted their eyes and shut their mouths.

  In David’s telling, the Catholic school he attended for at least first grade offered little sanctuary. He was frequently punished for not writing down assignments. (He needed glasses and couldn’t see the blackboard.) The nuns beat him, he said, and made him kneel on bags of marbles. His siblings attended the same school. Yes, Pat said, they had to kneel in the corner as punishment, but she didn’t recall any marbles. Steven did not recall any kneeling, just nuns hitting his hand with a ruler. According to David, they were all kicked out of Catholic school when they didn’t bring in five bucks for the Mother Superior’s birthday. Steven recalled being thrown out for fighting and remembered how glad he was when they all transferred to a public school, Irwin Elementary, in East Brunswick.

  For David, the woods became safe haven. He especially adored the unlovable reptile and insect realms. He always said that if he brought home some injured creature, his father would “take it in the yard” and make David “watch him shoot it.” How many wounded animals could he have found? His brother said, “I believe David saw things very magnified as a child.” So, while David spoke of his father firing guns in the house, both Pat and Steven said that didn’t happen. Not while they were living in East Brunswick. That came later. But they all remembered the rabbit story. In David’s words, Ed “killed our pet rabbit and fed it to us claiming it was ‘New York steak.’” David remembered their father revealing that it was their pet after forcing them to eat every bite. But Pat and Steven both said that he told them it was lamb, and that they only found out later that they’d eaten their own rabbit. They all thought it was disgusting, said Pat, “but David took it really, really bad.”

  One year, just before Christmas—probably in 1962—Ed gave each of the children five or six dollars to buy gifts and drove them to a five-and-dime store at a shopping center. When they finished and called home for a ride, their stepmother, Marion, told them, “I can’t get your father up.” He’d passed out drunk and Marion didn’t yet drive. They would have to walk home—roughly three and a half miles—in a snowstorm that was fast becoming a blizzard. Half their route lay along Highway 18, a major thoroughfare that was unsafe for pedestrians. David had purchased a couple of turtles, which he carried in a Chinese food container. They trudged out through the wind and drifting snow for a mile and a half till they reached the Colonial Diner, and David insisted they stop. He was worried about his turtles. As Pat remembered it, a waitress approached because David was crying; the turtles had frozen to death. The waitress called the police when she learned they were walking and had some two miles to go. Suddenly they had a police escort. Pat and Steven both spoke of how terrified they felt as the officers drove them home. When they arrived, the officers made Marion wake their father up so they could talk to him. But apparently no punishment was leveled. Steven speculated that “he was probably too scared to kick the shit out of us five minutes after the police left.”

  Once, when Ed confronted David over some transgression, David simply lied. Said he hadn’t done it, and his father believed him. David knew that lying was a sin, but he felt that God would surely understand if someone could just tell Him what Ed was like. So David folded his hands and prayed: “Meet me outside in five minutes. I’ll explain everything.”

  David had his first sexual encounters when he was too young to understand what they were. The first occurred with a boy who was fourteen when David was probably seven. He remembered asking the older boy, “Are we allowed to do this?”—and the older kid telling him, “Yeah.”

  An incident soon after this led to a nasty encounter with his father. Playing in one of the unfinished houses in the subdivision one day, David encountered a boy of about eighteen. The teenager took David to the attic and had David tie his hands to an overhead beam and take his pants down, then directed David to pull on his penis. David didn’t want to keep touching it, so he picked up some insulation, wrapped it around the older kid’s dick, and pulled. The kid screamed and David ran. His father got a phone call from the kid’s father, stripped and beat David, then pulled out his own penis and said to David, “Wanna play with it? Go ahead.” David refused and his father hit him again.

  David loved drawing from a very young age. Marion recalled that she could keep him occupied when the older two kids were in school by giving him a paper and pencil. Once he was in school though, he started tracing—and telling people he’d drawn the pictures freehand. Teachers never called his bluff. But at some point, his schoolmates confronted him. They made him draw a sheep. David surprised himself by actually doing it. “Looked pretty good,” he told me. “That’s when I started drawing my own things.” His young writing career developed through the same self-trickery. He’d lift stories from books and claim they were his own. That would explain the (regrettably lost) piece he wrote during this period about chasing wild anacondas through Africa, using deer as bait to lure them into cages. Then David began to invent his own stories.

  This was life without Ed, the life less visible in David’s Dateline and recollections.

  Work took Ed blessedly away from home for weeks, and occasionally months, at a time. Then life was regular, with restrictions. Marion wasn’t abusive, but she had her rules. They could not watch TV, listen to the radio, or play music. No snacks, no soda, no butter, no milk after breakfast. Marion was always conserving. Pat, David, and Steven changed their clothing and underwear once a week, and
all had to bathe in the same bathwater.

  Of course, as Steven admitted, they “were a handful.” Steven and David fought so much they finally had to have separate bedrooms. In Parlin, when David would have been five or six, their father broke up a fight one night that Steven saw, in retrospect, as “typical kid stuff.” But he was relegated to the furnace room—after Ed beat him—and his bed remained there until they moved. On Huntington Road, he and David shared a room again, if briefly. This time, it was Marion who moved Steven downstairs to the rec room. “They never had a hate for each other,” said Pat, who remembered the brothers conspiring in their kid way to gang up on her.

  Mostly, during the years in New Jersey, they were a team. David remembered the three of them sitting together behind Lee’s gas station, Pat reading a story to calm them after one of their dad’s beatings. Steven thought that might have been in Parlin, where there was a gas station two houses away. He used to go there to take naps in the bathroom.

  Once they got to Huntington Road, they would team up on occasional weekends to break into the nearby Dag Hammarskjöld Middle School. Pat would unlatch a window in the home economics room on Fridays, and the three of them would crawl through it the next day. There they could engage in at least one activity forbidden at home: Pat would bake cookies.

  Marion did not let them open the refrigerator without permission, much less allow Pat to bake. Sometimes they also broke into the school’s cafeteria. (Steven would brace a door open with a rock on Fridays.) They could open the freezer just enough to grab some ice cream bars or Popsicles. Sometimes they’d steal frozen burgers and hot dogs, take them to a nearby park, start a fire, and cook them.