by Mary Leo
To which Sharon screamed, “Oh-my-God!”
I stood up and held out the letter. Sharon gingerly touched the edges. Her mother told us both to calm down and sit down. We did for about a second, then we were off to Lisa’s house. I held the letter next to my chest as I ran, not wanting it to slip away or anything.
When we got to Lisa’s front porch the same thing happened, except for the paper bag part. By then, I was able to get out the right words with Sharon’s help.
“Are you sure?” Lisa the Skeptic asked.
I handed her the envelope, she looked at the postmark and said, “It can’t be. They aren’t even in Chicago until August. It’s not from Ringo.”
“Yes it is,” Sharon confirmed. “I read in Teen magazine that the Beatles send all their letters to the local fan clubs and the fan clubs mail them out. It’s cheaper that way and easier for the Beatles. That way they just address the envelopes and stick them in big boxes and ship them off. Do you really think the Beatles have time to send out one letter at a time? Don’t be silly.”
It sounded reasonable to me. We waited for Lisa to say something. She looked at the envelope again, then opened it and looked at the signature.
Sharon continued, “Besides, I’ve seen Ringo’s signature a million times and that looks just like it. Look at the way he makes his R. That’s definitely his signature.”
“It does look like it, doesn’t it?” she said, with a smile widening across her face. Then, all of a sudden, as if she were about to explode like a boiling teapot, she started screaming. We joined in on the hysteria. Lisa’s mother burst through the screen door and told us to shut up.
“But Mom,” Lisa whined, “It’s Ringo! It’s a letter from Ringo!”
“I don’t care if it’s a letter from the Pope. Stop all that screaming or get off the porch,” she scolded. Like a letter from the Pope could have any impact on us at all. Lisa’s mom just didn’t understand, so we tried to calm down, but we couldn’t stop ourselves from telling anyone who passed by.
“It’s a letter from Ringo Starr,” Lisa told Lucy Leo, who owned the corner grocery store, but she smiled, shook her head and walked away. Lisa told Mr. Toporis, who worked in the steel mill, but he didn’t respond. She even told Dolores Lombardo, who ran an Italian restaurant, but all she could say was “Huh!” and continued up the street.
What did they know anyway?
“What’s it say? What’s it say?” Sharon asked after Lisa had been holding onto it for about fifteen minutes.
“I don’t know. I haven’t read it yet,” I told her.
Lisa said, “Let me read it out loud. I’m good at that.”
“Be very careful. The paper’s really thin.”
She gingerly unfolded the letter and held it in front of her. To which we all screamed again and continued through most of the reading. Lisa’s mom apparently gave up yelling at us and not wanting to hear anymore of it, slammed the front door in defiance. Lisa began to read:
Dear Bird,
We’re traveling on a train right now on our way to our next gig. Had a sec, so I been answering me mail. I like writing letters. Helps me pass the time.
I don’t like this traveling thing much. Gets me down. But the country’s good to look at out the window. A lot of things have changed since we’ve been back. People too. Some forever, but America is always fab. Looking forward to the American part of the tour.
Till then…
Love,
Ringo
We made her read the letter over and over until we could get through the entire thing without screaming or fainting, which was difficult because every time she got to the “we’ll be there soon” part, we’d start up again.
All the kids in the neighborhood had to come over and see it, even some of the adults. One man told us to keep it (as if throwing it away was even a possibility) because one day it would be worth a lot of money (as if I could ever even consider selling it). I just smiled at him to be polite.
We spent most of the day out on Lisa’s front porch, talking to the neighbors, periodically wailing over the letter and telling our stories. Somehow our stories took on a realism they never had before because of the letter. We actually had made contact with the Beatles and Ringo had responded. And, he had touched the very piece of paper we were holding. I’d never wash my hands again.
“Do you realize that Ringo’s spit is on this envelope?” Sharon said, sometime in the middle of the afternoon. Of course, we all shrieked. The realization that part of Ringo Starr was somehow with us was just too much for me to handle. I started crying so hard that I couldn’t stop until Sharon’s sister threw a glass of water in my face. By then, it had been Lisa’s idea to cover the letter and envelope in plastic wrap so that we couldn’t mess up anything. That way, Ringo’s essence would remain on the letter forever. Good thing too, because a few drops of water had fallen on the plastic wrap. That would have been a catastrophe!
“You girls are really crazy. Get a grip,” Mandy ordered. She had come over to see the letter like everyone else, but was annoyed by my incessant weeping. “Take a break. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
After that little episode, we calmed down. Maybe it was the water or maybe we had had enough time to assimilate what had happened. I didn’t know, but whatever it was, the rest of the day passed easily. Only minimal tears and screams.
Nothing could part us from that letter, and even though our parents wanted each of us to sleep in our own beds that night, we just couldn’t. So that night, the night of July 13, 1966, we slept at my house in Jeffery Manor less than a mile from the 100th Street bridge, on South Crandon Ave, one of the safest neighborhoods in Chicago, according to my dad.
Chapter Twenty-nine
September, 1987
Around dawn, I drove back to the motel and immediately took a shower in order to assess the damage. I had a split lip that could be covered with makeup as soon as the swelling went down and a large bump on the side of my head that burned when the water hit it. My dried blood liquefied and turned the water a bright red as it swirled around my feet and rushed down the drain, like a colorized Psycho. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as I had first thought, except for the chronic headache.
After the shower and four aspirins, I phone Mike.
“Hello,” he says, sleep still in his throat.
“It’s me,” I tell him while reclining on the bed, holding a washcloth filled with ice cubes against my nose, then my lip. Each hurts equally as bad.
“Where the hell have you been?”
I ignore his question. “I won’t be in today. Nursing a hangover.”
“You all right?”
I have to come up with some kind of story or Mike won’t stop drilling me. “Yes. Couldn’t sleep. Drove around most of the night. Got a little drunk, so I pulled over and slept it off in my car.”
“I mean about the missing videotape.”
I don’t want to answer him. Don’t know what to say. Can’t talk to Mike about it. Don’t want to tell him how I feel. What’s the point? So he can somehow try to fix my emotions? Like that’s at all possible. Like all he has to do is listen, tell me how he feels my pain, give me a hug and bam—I’m over it. What about the cuts on my head and lip? Maybe he can feel that pain as well.
He says, “Carly? You still there?”
“Yes. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you later. Have to get some real sleep. In a bed.”
“Wait,” he says. “Did you get the new script? I left it outside your door last night. There’s some scene changes. Nothing that affects the prison. Some stuff they added in the police station. Might need to do a callback for that. You should probably take a look at it.”
“Didn’t see it. Let me check,” I tell him dropping the receiver on the bed and heading for the door. Sure enough, the script is sitting on the ground just outside my door. Must have walked right past it. “Got it,” I tell him once I’m back on the bed. “I’m really tired.”
&nbs
p; “Carly, I’m sorry about what happened. I don’t know why the Captain—”
I cut him off. “We’ll talk later. I need to go.”
I hang up.
All the changes to the script had been typed on bright pink paper. Don’t know why, but it makes me think of that flamboyant pimp I met on Maxwell Street while we were collecting extras for a different scene. Wonder if we need to do a callback on him? He’s such a problem.
I’m pacing now, and thinking. Back and forth from the bathroom to the front door. Something’s happening. Back and forth. Back and forth. Getting energized as I walk. Like somehow I’ve got a rechargeable battery inside me and the more I walk the more powered up I become. I keep fanning the pages of the script, over and over. There’s some connection. This script. Something. Arnold’s character, Danko, using whatever means to avenge his slain partner. Danko getting even. Getting his revenge.
Then, my Great Aunt Betty flashes up on my inner screen. There she is, playing the piano in her tiny apartment on the North Side. It’s Sunday and my dad and I have taken the I.C. train up to visit her. I’m carrying one of her pink birthday hankies in my pocket. “Out of respect,” my dad always said.
Once again she’s telling us what it was like to play the organ at the Chicago Theater when she was a young woman. How she helped raise my father with the money she made at the theater. Telling us that old joke about how everybody else had to pay to get into the movies but she was paid to go to the movies…and how she snuck my father in when he was just four years old to help her turn the pages on the sheet music. That’s it! The sheet music! Of course. It all makes perfect sense.
“I can still make it right. Prove that I’m not a chicken.”
Chapter Thirty
Sometime in the late afternoon, I drive back to my apartment in Chicago doing ninety most of the way. Feels good to be home. I’m able to chill with a smoke and a couple shots while I go through some of my mail: ads for local businesses, discounts on grapes and red potatoes at the local Jewel Supermarket—I’ll rush right down.
My apartment, a 1923 brown-stone, with wooden floors and high ceilings, smells tight and stale. I open a window to let in some air and city noise. A mild rainstorm tries to dampen the end-of-summer heat and clean out the rotten smells. It’s succeeding. A cool breeze drifts in filled with the clean fresh smell of rain hitting the pavement and the sounds of cars rushing by on water. City music. It relaxes me like a fine wine or a Mozart symphony. Lincoln Park sits across the street, Lake Michigan just beyond it, rolling restless. City people busy with movement—feeling the thrill of life. I want to stay right here, never move, let life come in to meet me instead of me going out to meet life. Just relax. Just enjoy. Let Mike rule my world. Give it up to his power.
But the videotape has been destroyed.
The phone rings. “Hello?”
Mike says, “Hi. Finally! Wish you would tell me when you leave.”
“I’ll be back tonight.”
“Don’t bother. The prison’s on a lockdown. Nobody can move. Been locked in here all day. You can’t contact me. Captain Bob says it might take all night. Might as well stay home. Gotta go, some guy wants to use the phone. I better let him. He’s bigger than me. Bye.”
A click. Silence. I hang up.
Captain Bob? Can’t figure out if Mike knows about the destruction of the video or not and he’s just not telling me. Maybe he even asked for it. Protecting me, like he always does.
Aunt Betty’s sheet music is in my trunk, somewhere on the bottom, relegated to forgotten memories rather than cherished keepsakes. The trunk, Sharon’s dad’s World War II trunk, sits at the foot of my bed and has been with me ever since Sharon and her family moved to Wisconsin. We snuck it off the back of the moving van because we were sure Sharon’s mom would find it and ruin everything. Lisa couldn’t keep it because her little brother and sister were getting into all of her stuff, so I was chosen because our dreams were safe with me. What a thought. As if I could ever go back to those Beatles fantasies after Richard Speck.
I pour another shot of bourbon (this time adding water), put on my vinyl Rubber Soul album and head for the trunk. Have to stay calm.
I hate even opening the damn thing. Too much of the past comes pouring out. Like I’m supposed to get a childhood glow every time I look inside. After all these years it still makes me ill. Gives me nightmares. Makes me want to find another tree to plow into. This time, however, I can go with its pull, embrace its destruction, feel good about who I am. Who I’m meant to be.
Carefully, I lift the heavy lid. No sound, no creak. Lisa’s oil still lubricates its hinges. Lavender fills the air, permeating my memory, allowing me to see their faces, remember our promises, promises we never kept. For the first time in years I find myself tearing up over the memories of Sharon and Lisa, my two best friends. Never heard from Sharon after she moved. Lisa and I drifted apart after that summer. Don’t know where she is now. Makes me sad to think about her. Must be Mike’s influence. Can’t let it in. Not now. Not when I’m so close.
The top of the trunk is filled with newspaper clippings about the nurses. Those eight women, frozen forever in their white nurse’s caps. Wearing their eternal smiles. Not really people, not flesh and blood, but victims. Victims of a killer who’s not sorry he took their lives. Who thinks it’s amusing… “Just wasn’t their night.” Funny. Real funny. Such irony. He’s been allowed to age, to breathe, to feel, to decide. Richard Franklin Speck—murderer and trustee.
The Chicago papers carried the story for weeks. Showed pictures of the townhouse where the girls were killed, the missing screen on the back window where Speck entered. Why didn’t Suzie notice it when she came in to make a phone call to the housemother, then left again to go next door while Speck was upstairs tying Nina Schmale and the others with shredded bed sheets? Was it too dark for her to see it in that alley or maybe she was too excited about life to notice a pulled-out screen.
There are pictures of the rooms inside the townhouse, the metal bunk beds, a rag doll, a bulletin board with a note: “Dear Nina, May the Lord bless you and guide your path.” Signed, “Mother.”
Headlines: “Yesterday, So Full of Life,” “How Girls Met Their Doom,” “Chicago’s Agonizing Riddle,” “Eight Nurses Slain in Apartment—Killer Flees,” “Knife found off 100th Street Bridge” —our bridge, the bridge that reminded us of England and convinced us that Wolf was a German sailor.
Pictures of a neighborhood waiting, looking, watching as the bodies are brought out. One by one, carried on canvas stretchers by solemn-looking policemen. The nurses wrapped in white bed sheets, the outlines of their bodies visible under the thin cloth, cloth so sheer you think you can see their tortured faces crying out to you.
There’s a clipping of a young girl’s face as a stretcher passes right in front of her. So close she could reach out and touch the passing body. She does. Cold. Still. The cop tells her to step aside. Where was the young girl’s mother? Why didn’t she keep her home that morning? Why did she let her see? Let her be a witness to an uncovered hand that she recognized? A hand wearing the ring that she’d envied?
The shaking begins again, taking hold of me. Starting from the inside working its way out until my limbs go weak and I collapse on the floor. Wanting it to stop. Wanting the agony to go away. Wanting the memories to die forever. There’s only one way to stop this torture, one way for me to make some kind of restitution for my cowardly behavior. For my inability to act when I knew something was wrong. That Wolf wasn’t who we thought he was.
That I trusted evil.
I glance at the headline that chafes my soul: “The Mass Murder: How Could This Happen?” And I know exactly how this could happen. I didn’t warn Pauline. I didn’t warn the nurses. I didn’t tell anyone what I saw that night.
Twisting myself up I can hear Nina Schmale’s drawn-out voice. She wants me to know, wants the world to know who she was. From my purse, I pull out the stationery Lisa gave me for my love
letters. It’s always with me, wherever I go, along with the scented pen Sharon gave me for my birthday that year. I only use the pen and paper when the voices start. When I can’t stop what they want to say. When I have to write their words down somewhere. Somewhere special. Somewhere sacred:
My name is Nina Schmale.
Funny how something like an air conditioner can make you popular. That was me, popular. Especially when the temperature got into the nineties. You’d be amazed at how many friends I could squeeze into my tiny bedroom. We’d sit around at night or during the day, talking and laughing, not wanting to ever leave.
I remember the hum of my air conditioner that night when Richard Speck walked me back to my room where Mary Ann and Suzanne had planned on spending the night with me. I had heard them come in. Laughing. Heard their struggle with Speck, but my two friends never entered the back bedroom where the rest of us sat on the floor, our hands and feet bound. I got scared.
When I look back on it now, of course, I handled him all wrong. I should have seen the madness in his eyes. The Filipino nurses saw it, but we wouldn’t listen. I wouldn’t listen. After all, I had been trained in this. Dealing with psychoses was my specialty. My direction as a nurse. What did they know? Besides, they were from another country. Another culture. We were Americans. Speck was an American. He wouldn’t hurt us. Not really. He just wanted money to go to New Orleans. All we had to do was cooperate so we could go on with our lives, our plans.
My boyfriend Peter and I were going to be married sometime after my graduation. We hadn’t set the date yet, but there was no hurry. We knew we loved each other and had loved each other ever since high school. There was plenty of time.
I liked to take things slow and not rush through life. It drove some of my friends crazy, but after awhile they’d get used to me. I guess it was because of my beautiful mother. She was disabled and took life at a slower pace. I loved her for giving me the gift of ‘living in the moment’ and savoring each action. I suppose she was also the reason why I wanted to be a nurse. To be able to help people like her.
