Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  David also claimed, in his Dateline, that he’d stolen science equipment from Dag Hammarskjöld Middle School for Steven to sell. No, said Steven, laughing: “Who would I have sold it to?” But David did help him steal some money. Steven had gotten himself into a jam. Their father was a comic book reader. He never shared them, but he’d leave them in the bathroom, and one day Steven found an ad in the back pages promising that you could make a fortune selling flower seeds. He sent away for the seeds, then intercepted them at the mailbox. Neither his dad nor his stepmother knew a thing about it. He went door to door and sold the whole shipment, then spent the money on ice cream, cake, and soda. Now he was in trouble. He had no money to pay for the seeds; his dad would find out; he’d get a beating. David, apparently a regular at the school library, let Steven know that there was a fine box on the librarian’s desk. On Friday, David unlatched the library window. On Saturday, the brothers went over to Hammarskjöld and David boosted Steven through the window. He found almost twenty-five dollars in the fine box, big money for a kid back in the sixties, enough that he could pay for the seeds and treat himself and David to snacks at Mom’s Market.

  “We just broke in to try to save my life,” as Steven put it. Still, when David went back to the library the next Monday, he worried. He told Steven that night that he thought the librarian suspected him. He didn’t relish breaking the rules. Not at this point in his life.

  The children never knew when Ed was due back from one of his voyages. He would go directly from the boat to a local bar and call home from there. Then Marion would pick him up and tell him on the way home what the kids had been doing wrong. That’s always when Ed would deliver his worst beatings. “You were never warned,” said Pat. “That was the worst thing. Mentally, you were not prepared.” Walking home from school, if they saw that the station wagon was gone, they panicked. Marion never left without forewarning them, unless it was to pick up their father. They’d become completely unnerved. They’d be anguished. That was Pat’s word: anguished. Because none of them had keys, they had to wait out in the yard. “We’d be waiting for half an hour,” Pat said. “And half an hour would turn into forty-five minutes, and we’d start going, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, please don’t let it be him, please, please, please.’ “ Ed would arrive home drunk and raging as he got out of the car—“YOOOOOU! GET IN HERE!”

  One day, said Pat, she cracked: “I couldn’t take it anymore.” He’d returned from his weeks at sea and ordered them to sit in the yard and “don’t move” while he took them one at a time to the basement for a beating. “He took Steven first, and I could hear the screams of Steven—with David and I just sitting there. Then David went down—or maybe they went down vice versa. I can’t remember. I heard the screams. I just said, I have to get out of here. I have to run. I have to get us away from this.” She got up and sprinted toward Dag Hammarskjöld Middle School—more terrified than ever, since she’d now violated the order not to move—and screamed at the crossing guard: “Call the police! I want to go to the police! I want to go to the police!”

  The crossing guard took the hysterical Pat inside to the principal’s office, but she wouldn’t tell anybody what was wrong. “It’s like I didn’t want them to know what was going on in our home. Just—I want the police.” Suddenly she heard her father’s voice out in the hallway. “And when I heard his voice,” she said. “I freaked out again. I just climbed the walls. I said, ‘Get him away from me. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see him. I want the police!’ ”

  Steven remembered this incident vividly. When their father saw that Pat was not in the yard, he put David and Steven in the car. “I remember the two of us just crying and yelling, ‘Patty, Patty, Patty.’ We were so worried about her,” he said. Ed prowled the neighborhood, demanding, “You gotta tell. Where would she go?” One of the boys suggested the school; it had always been their refuge and resource.

  Officials at the school did not hand Pat back to her father. They called the cops. But when the police finally came, they didn’t know what to do. Pat kept telling them, “I am not going back to that house. He beats us.” She was twelve or thirteen at the time. So they took her to the police station, “trying to find a solution” that would work for her. They promised Pat that if she went home, they’d make sure her father didn’t hurt her. “I said, ‘No way.’ I was not going. Because sense came back to my head. I said, ‘He’s gonna kill me.’ “ Finally, one of the officers said she could stay with his family for a few days.

  Ed did change his behavior after Pat returned to Huntington Road. “He never touched us again,” Pat declared. But Steven was startled to hear that. He said his father never stopped beating him or David.

  Suddenly, some five years after the kidnapping, Dolores reappeared. No one remembers how or why, but she showed up at a meeting after Pat had “cracked,” a meeting at a local Catholic church that Steven didn’t know about, that Marion didn’t recall, and whose purpose can only be surmised. But Pat was there, and she remembered having “such a strange feeling” when she saw her mother again “after all the years of not seeing her.” Dolores told Pat then that she could take her to live in Manhattan, but couldn’t afford to take all three of them, so she thought it best to take no one.

  In January 1964, Ed lost his job on the United States Lines, which had employed him since 1945. According to Marion, he got into an argument and quit. According to Steven, he was fired. David seemed to confirm that version when he wrote in one of his journals that Ed had started a fight on board and broke a whiskey bottle over someone’s head.

  For a while, Ed found work on ships that had just come into port, repairing or maintaining the engines while the crew was ashore. One day he arrived home with a Manhattan phone book, and Steven looked through it for his mother’s name: Voyna. He couldn’t remember how he knew that she’d taken the name Voyna. But there it was. And he whispered to Pat and David, “I found Mommy’s number.”

  Ed lay passed out in a drunken stupor, and Steven went through his pockets for change. Then, all three of them rode their bikes together to the nearest phone booth and crowded inside. Steven dialed and said, “Are you my mother?” They told Dolores they wanted to see her.

  So began a series of surreptitious visits. They’d tell Marion they were going to the park for the day, she’d give them a sandwich, and they’d ride their bikes to the bus stop. Dolores met them there, took them into the city to her apartment or to a museum, then brought them back. As long as they were home by five, there was never a problem. Pat thought they made five or six of these trips. David seemed to remember only the one that included a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. No doubt this was the first time he ever set foot in an art museum; he was impressed by a painting of a tree with babies in its branches (probably Pavel Tchelitchew’s surrealist Leaf Children). He said later that this was what inspired him to become an artist, though when he went home and tried to re-create the piece, he utterly failed.

  “There was a catalyst that got my mother to call,” said Steven, but he couldn’t remember what that was. Just that Dolores finally did call the house on Huntington Road. She got Marion and said she wanted to see her kids.

  “I was in shock,” Marion said.

  It wasn’t just that Marion hadn’t known about the children’s secret visits. She’d been told, by Ed, that he legally had custody and that Dolores had left them “to shack up with some millionaire.” Marion believed this.

  So she told Dolores that she’d have to talk to Ed about it, and he wasn’t home. But when he did get home—“Oh, he had a fit,” said Marion. “After all them years. All of a sudden, she wants to be involved.” But they made arrangements. Dolores would come to the house to get her children on certain Saturdays and keep them till Sunday. She would take a taxi from the bus station, or drive. “I guess she borrowed a car from somebody,” Marion said. “I know she had a boyfriend. I think he worked for Mattel Toys. Because the kids used to come home with all these toys from the
weekends. I wasn’t able to control ’em after she had ’em. Then she would get on the phone and start telling me how rotten Ed was. I told her, ‘I don’t want to hear this. Don’t call me again.’ ” When Ed found out about that, he got them an unlisted phone number. Then, when Dolores wanted to see the kids, she had to send a telegram.

  This went on for a while. Then one weekend, a taxi showed up without Dolores and the driver announced that he was there to take the children to the bus. Marion thought he looked scruffy and suspicious. Ed sent him away and took the kids to church. Dolores soon showed up and said something nasty to Marion—who slapped her.

  Neither Pat nor Steven remembered Dolores coming to the house, or sending taxis, or tangling with Marion.

  Pat thought it was all her fault that they were suddenly, unceremoniously, and permanently banished from their father’s house. She had started writing Dolores letters. On one of them, fifteen pages long, she did not use enough postage. When it came back, Marion and Ed both read it. “The worst thing that ever happened,” Pat said. “My father called me to come talk to him, and he had the letter in his hand. Scared the hell out of me. Because I had written ‘my stepmother buys me ugly shoes’ and, you know, stuff kids will say to their mom. And my father said, ‘Pack your shit. You guys are going back to your mother. You don’t appreciate anything.’ My mother wasn’t even aware we were coming until we arrived. He threw us at her doorstep.”

  But Marion didn’t recall anything about a letter. She thought the breaking point for Ed came when Dolores appeared at the house. “He says, ‘You want the kids? You take the kids. I can’t go through this and neither can Marion. After all these years you want ’em, take ’em. But there’s no money.’ ” Marion said she packed the children’s things and then Ed drove them to Dolores’s apartment.

  David remembered the handoff happening at a restaurant near Port Authority and that they sat there while Ed told Dolores what little shits these kids were, what a waste of money. It was Horn and Hardart’s, Steven clarified, inside Port Authority. He remembered sitting at a table for more than an hour while their parents talked and he ate a piece of spice cake. Pat had no memory of being in or near Port Authority at all. She was certain their father dropped them directly at Dolores’s door. She could picture it.

  No one could tell me when this happened. Not the year, much less the month. Not whether it was hot out or cold. Not even Marion. Here the timeline just disintegrates. Steven felt sure he was in the eighth grade, so—1965 or ’66. Pat couldn’t remember what grade or even what school she was in. David situated the whole mess in 1963, which is certainly too early. According to his and Steven’s school records, they entered the New York City system on January 10, 1966. They still could have arrived late in 1965. When their father shoved them into Dolores’s care, he probably didn’t bring their school records.

  David would have been eleven. But, wherever and whenever this transfer—this trauma—occurred, one thing that stayed with all the children was the coldness of their father’s fury. He just abruptly left. “Dumped us. No goodbye. No nothing,” said Steven. Nor in the years that followed would any of them get so much as a phone call or a birthday card from Ed.

  “So we finally find our mother. This is going to be our salvation,” Steven said to me, his voice shaking, thinking no doubt of what had happened instead.

  2 DISSOLUTION

  Dolores lived in a one-bedroom apartment just west of Eighth Avenue, a short walk from Times Square. She and Pat shared the bedroom, while David and Steven slept in the living room on a mat and a fold-up cot. Certainly Dolores had not expected her children to ever move in. But once they were there, she told them that she’d been hunting and tracking them for years, and that every time she found them, Ed would move again, rooting them out of school and away from friends. As Pat remembered it, “She said, ‘Guys, I never disappeared from your life. I just thought that I had to give you some stability.’ ” To do that, Dolores explained, she had to stop chasing them.

  But if she’d been looking—and finding—why had she never taken legal action? Especially after the children found her. Pat speculated that her mother never had the money to hire a lawyer. Steven wondered whether his mother had ever even looked. But David believed she had. As did Pat, who cited a day back in Michigan at the Catholic boarding school she hated, when she thought she heard her mother’s voice in the hallway. “Apparently she found me and tried to get in touch, but the school said she did not have permission. They did not have permission from my father.” Pat thought her mother had worked in Detroit as a model at auto shows. Among Ed’s papers, I found evidence that Dolores had indeed been in Michigan at that time. Ed filled out a document related to his service in the Naval Reserve, listing his ex-wife’s address as “Detroit.” It’s dated August 1959. A month later, Ed married Marion and moved east, probably to be closer to his ship rather than to evade Dolores.

  Marion knew nothing about Dolores ever hunting them, or finding them, or propelling Ed to move—until after Dolores had the children living with her. According to Marion, Dolores then bought clothes for them at Macy’s and charged it to Ed’s credit card. He refused to pay, ignored the subsequent letter from a lawyer, and then decided to leave East Brunswick so Dolores wouldn’t know where he was. He moved his remaining family to nearby Spotswood in May 1966.

  When I interviewed David in 1990, he told me that Dolores had decided within two or three days that taking her kids back had been a mistake.

  None of them knew when she’d arrived in New York City, or what she’d been doing since the day they were kidnapped. Modeling, Pat thought. Showrooms and runways. Dolores does not show up in a Manhattan phone directory until 1962–63, living on East Seventy-first Street. She’s not in the directory for 1963–64, then reappears in 1964–65 on the relatively angelic eastern edge of Hell’s Kitchen. She was working as a secretary/receptionist by then, but living in a doorman building. David described her as “sophisticated, arty.”

  She encouraged the children to express themselves, where their father had beaten them for showing emotion of any kind. So, after years of pent-up rage, they erupted. “Once she gave us the green light, we were having these ransacking fights,” David recalled. “Beds would get thrown. Shelves would come tumbling down. Basically we were trying to kill each other.” It wasn’t that the battles were new. It’s that now they didn’t stop. Back in Jersey, Pat said, they “could never play a game together because it would always end up in a fight. Someone would cheat or something.” And of course, David and Steven had a history of squabbling. But in Jersey, they’d also shared moments of camaraderie, building forts together or breaking into the school. Suburban life came with built-in chances to get away from each other—to the woods, friends’ houses, or their own backyard. Now they were inhabiting cramped quarters in a tough neighborhood. And whatever bond they’d had as a threesome began to come apart.

  Her life suddenly akimbo, Dolores tried taking her angry kids to family counseling at an East Side church. Steven remembered going for individual sessions, getting help with his nightmares. As Pat remembered it, though, they often spent group sessions complaining to the therapist—about Dolores. That didn’t last long. Dolores got fed up. Soon she also had to apply for welfare and food stamps, since her job didn’t pay enough to support three children. Pat remembered waiting hours with “a hundred people sitting in chairs” to see what she called “the welfare dentist.” Ed never gave them a dime.

  Dolores had put a life together that didn’t exactly jibe with full-time motherhood. Steven recalled that one hot summer day they went to use the swimming pool at a hotel on Forty-second Street. Dolores had a boyfriend who could get them access. When Steven called to her from the pool, “Mom, Mom, look,” she marched to the water’s edge and glared at him, declaring, “Don’t call me ‘Mom.’ ” Steven figured she was worried about impressing “some dude,” but he found it quite painful. Eventually—no one remembered who started it or when—they all ju
st called her “Dolores.” Meanwhile, the children all began using the last name “Voyna.”

  After Pat turned sixteen in January 1966, Dolores took her to the nearest Woolworth’s to apply for a job. Pat began working there every weekday after school and all day Saturday, turning at least half her salary over to Dolores. Pat attended Charles Evans Hughes High School, then an institution in serious decline. (Disciplinary problems were so bad by 1981 that teachers picketed, and the school closed shortly thereafter.)

  David had entered Public School 111 on West Fifty-third Street in the second semester of sixth grade, no doubt reeling with culture shock. New York in the late sixties was a city in crisis—filthy, polluted, chaotic, violent, and roiling with racial tensions. The parks were dangerous and scarred by vandals. The subways were veritable trains through hell, un-air-conditioned, stinking, and often breaking down. Litter and dog shit fouled every piece of pavement. And Hell’s Kitchen was still dominated by gangs like the notorious Westies. David addressed none of it in his Dateline for that first year in Manhattan. “Made cash drawing classmates sexual fantasies for lunch money,” he wrote. An evaluation at the end of the school year said he was reading at the tenth grade level and seemed to like science. He had missed just one half day of school. But he got an “unsatisfactory” in half the social behavior categories (such as “gets along well with other children”). He didn’t always pay attention. Nor did he participate in class discussions. He kept to himself.

  During their first summer in New York, 1966, Dolores got both David and Steven into a Boys’ Club summer camp. Pat, who stayed in the city to work, recalled that David sent Dolores a postcard describing the dangers he had been facing at camp—how he’d gone to swim alone at a lake where no one was supposed to swim, how he’d encountered a huge snake. “My mother was shaking,” Pat said. “She goes, ‘He’s going to drive me nuts.’”