Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  The gate to the gardens was open and Paul and I could just see the small wooden house built by Walt’s father. I knew from my reading that this small dwelling contained ‘the borning room’ where his mother let Walt slip from between her legs. Externally it looked like an ordinary unpainted clapboard house but any aficionado would tell you the place had unusually wide doorways, high ceilings and built-in cupboards, all of which Walt’s dad got credit for. Built-in cupboards? Wide doorways? My guess is Mrs Whitman had a hand in the plans.

  Amityville, Long Island

  George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue on December 18. Twenty-eight days later, they fled in terror.

  Jay Anson, The Amityville Horror

  Joyously for me, Joyce had moved to Amityville. Mention where you are going to anyone in England and they say, ‘Do you mean like The Amityville Horror?’

  And of course you do. The town council is unhappy about it. Their website directs you to much pleasanter possibilities in the community. Everyone is encouraged, for example, to join the thriving Parrot Fancier’s Club (Meetings — Second Thursday of each month at the Masonic Temple at 14 Avon Place in Amityville, from 6—10 p.m.). The club, you will be pleased to hear, is ‘dedicated to the ethical treatment of psittacines in captivity as well as their preservation in the wild’. I had no idea psittacines were in trouble. Indeed, I thought they sounded like a bit of a bar snack. At the club you can find all the ‘parrot-related information’ you will ever need, as well as meet Dr Heidi Hoefer, who is willing to microchip ‘parrots larger than a cockatiel’. There is more to it than you might think and in my desire to help can I just pass on this message to everyone:

  WARN OTHERS ABOUT THE DANGERS OF TEFLON. BUY YOUR BIRD-LOVING FRIENDS A BUMPER STICKER THAT MIGHT SAVE A LIFE. PLEASE READ MURDER BY OVEN (available via www.parrotfanciersclub.com) IF YOU THINK IT CAN’T HAPPEN TO YOU.

  I’m afraid I don’t know what the dangers of Teflon are except that you can’t get the bird to stick to the pan however hard you try. Still, if the parrot world is not for you, how about the Paumanauke Drum and Dance Team who ‘strive to travel the good path through the practice of the Native American Traditions of Modern Pow Wow Drum, Dance and Customs’? Or the Junior League or the Knights of Columbus or the Masons or anything in fact other than driving down Ocean Avenue to stare at the house at 112.

  I don’t like horror films. Actually I don’t like anything scary at all and find the death of Bambi’s mother about the celluloid limit of what I can cope with. I have never seen the movie of the Amityville Horror but the story resonates. The house where the supernatural events supposedly took place still stands in a beautiful, leafy, suburban street leading down to the water’s edge. It is a white clapboard place with its wide front facing side on to the street. The house has two storeys with further rooms in the attic and a boathouse right on the Amityville river. Anyone who owned such a place would think they had, as the records describe, ‘attained a trophy-size piece of the American Dream’.

  About the time I was first settling in America, the house was bought by Ronald DeFeo, Sr, a Buick dealer from Brooklyn. The place was called High Hopes and Ronald moved his wife Louise and kids from the city out to Long Island in high hopes of a better, quieter life. Now Ron had made a few bucks out of selling cars but it may shock some people to discover that that didn’t necessarily make him a nice person. By all accounts he had a vicious temper which he took out on his wife and his eldest son Ron Jr, known as Butch. (Of course he was. I think every American story should have someone called Butch in it.) As Butch grew he too developed a temper and soon father and son were quite often beating each other up. This was clearly a problem that Ron Sr decided to solve by throwing money at it. Butch started to get whatever he wanted. Aged fourteen, he was given a $14,000 speedboat to cruise on the river.

  Soon Butch turned to drugs and became even more of a tricky child. He got a job in the family car business but was paid whether he showed up or not. (Can anyone else see parenting hints in this story — or is it just me?) The young man grew gradually more charming with various episodes in which he calmly threatened friends and family with a loaded shotgun. Then there was a final confrontation over $20,000 Butch stole from the business and things were ready to come to a head.

  At three in the morning on Wednesday, 14 November 1974, everyone at 112 Ocean Avenue was asleep except lovely young Butch. It seems he had decided the family had to go. He wasn’t willing to sit around and wait for some Teflon-induced killer fumes to off them all, so he took a .35-calibre Marlin rifle from his rather extensive weapons collection, went to his parents’ room and shot them. First his father with two bullets, then two into his mother. His two younger brothers, John and Mark, were next with single shots, followed by his sisters Alison and Dawn. The whole thing took about fifteen minutes. Butch cleaned himself up, drove to Brooklyn where he disposed of his clothes and the gun in a storm drain and went to work at the family dealership.

  When the police began their investigation it was Butch who alerted them to the murders and who was incredibly helpful in their inquiries but it didn’t take long for the truth to come out.

  ‘Once I started,’ he explained to the police, ‘I just couldn’t stop. It went so fast.’ So, Butch went to prison for twenty-five years on six counts of second-degree murder. I have no idea why second degree and not first but he’s still in some New York jail. So it was horrible, but it’s what happened next that annoys the locals. A writer called Jay Anson wrote a supposedly non-fiction account of what happened to the new owners of 112 Ocean Avenue, the Lutz family.

  ‘Their fantastic story, never before disclosed in full detail, makes for an unforgettable book with all the shocks and gripping suspense of The Exorcist, The Omen or Rosemary’s Baby, but with one vital difference … the story is true’ trumpets the back cover of the paperback. The book went on to become a highly successful film telling how the Lutz family was forced to flee the house in February 1976 due to the place being awash with demons and all manner of evil spirits.

  There are those who doubt the whole thing. I don’t want to be horrid about George Lutz, partly because I never met him and partly because he’s probably still alive and Americans will sue you in a heartbeat, but he does seem to have been a bit of an amateur dabbler in psychic phenomena, demonology, witchcraft and so on. Certainly The Amityville Horror contains every sort of ghoulie, ghostie and demon you could ever hope to gather for a bit of sheet-shaking and chain-rattling. A veritable panoply of poltergeists. It can’t have been much fun living there what with the pig floating outside the living-room window with bright red eyes, the walls covered with slime, the porcelain lion that bit George on the ankle, the endless levitating out of bed for Kathy and the demonic, hooded figures who insisted on hanging about the fireplace. Yet the Lutzes were built of stern stuff and hung in there for twenty-eight days before fleeing into the arms of Mr Anson and the world of publishing.

  Today the tale is debunked and derided in the town but the new owners at 112 are still disturbed by the presence of ungodly people; folks like myself and Paul who drive by just to see the house. It is not the image that a town whose very title is friendly wants to present.

  The first European name for the village of Amityville was Huntington South West Neck, which is a mouthful on anybody’s postcard. By 1850 there were nearly a thousand locals in Huntington South West Neck and the people decided to come up with something snappier. I think they were right. The name of a place does matter. There are towns on Long Island called Hicksville and Plain View which just displays a poor sense of PR. Now, unlike the early settlers, the Huntington South West Neck people hadn’t just arrived from somewhere they could simply transform into New Something-or-other, so discussion about a new moniker took some time. The most popular version of the change to Amityville is that there was so much argument about a suitable choice that a Mrs Ruth Williams, wife of Nathaniel Williams, tried to calm everything down by declaring, ‘Friends, what this
meeting needs is some amity, otherwise we should name our village Contraryville.’

  There are two things I like about this tale:

  1. That there followed a fairly strong movement to adopt the name ‘Contraryville’. This, I think, says a lot about human beings the world over.

  2. That it is Ruth’s husband, Nathaniel, who is mentioned in all the history books, despite having had nothing to do with any of it.

  The history of the town proceeded rather sedately with the usual openings of schools, churches and, for me, the memorable unveiling of the Long Island Home for Nervous Invalids in 1881. I like the idea of being a nervous invalid. I picture myself a weak waif of a woman who is startled each time a syringe plunger is drawn back. The town once suffered a hurricane and once an earthquake, and Al Capone used to summer here, but it is none of these things the world recalls about Amityville.

  Time for lunch with a Gladys. Joyce lives in a small neat grey house in the town, in yet another suburban street. The only daughter of Italian descendants; I have no recollection of her parents at all. I think I would have recognised her if we had met by accident. Hair still shoulder-length, neatly dressed with a thin body. She was thin when we were at high school and, despite having three kids, she was still thin. I blame genetics. It’s funny about one’s lot in life. I inherited a zest for living, absolutely no money and a waistline which makes me look like I swallowed the Michelin man.

  You do get a good welcome from an American. Annoyingly, I think Joyce was as pleased to see Paul, whom she had never met, as she was me. I wish I could capture her speech pattern on paper but it is impossible. Of all the Gladyses I would say Joyce has the strongest New York accent. She refers to her home as ‘Lawnge Guyland’ and talked about what a ‘lawnge toyme’ it had been since we had seen each other. From the moment we arrived I had a sense that Joyce rarely entertained and was even more rarely the focus of a conversation. She seemed to need to unload and was more than happy to fill me in on her life. We had a meal in her kitchen which contained the largest stove I have ever seen. Built in 1953, it was a kind of oven on steroids, a huge thing. Joyce laughed about it.

  ‘I keep waiting for it to doye so I can get a nooh one but it just keeps going.’

  After high school Joyce went to college in Oswego in upstate New York. She was studying elementary education when she met and married her husband Alan. She never pursued her career in education because ‘we needed the money’, so after graduating she went to work in the personnel department of a construction company in Manhattan. I don’t remember Alan but there are pictures of him on the fridge. He has bright red hair and comes from an Irish background although no one is sure where exactly as his father was an orphan. Alan works as an accountant in the city. He at least pursued his career.

  Joyce and Alan have three children: Matt seventeen, David thirteen and Kelly five. I wondered, fleetingly, if every Gladys would be at home with three children but no two lives are the same. David was at home. He had been to the orthodontist and had the day off school. He was the baby I had met in Joyce’s flat. He didn’t eat with us but spent his time on the computer. A sweet boy with glasses and something of a faraway look. He clearly suffers with some physical difficulties and Joyce explained that he is going to need jaw surgery as it is not developing properly.

  ‘He is what they call “low tone”,’ she explained. ‘He is borderline cerebral palsy but no one really knows…’

  The troubles Americans can have when faced with medical bills, no money and no national health system tumbled to the fore. She and Alan have spent almost every penny at the doors of doctors, for the problems David has are not the kind covered by insurance. Without a shred of self-pity Joyce talked about her life. About the privations and the heartaches and about how David has the reading age of a nine-year-old and every night is a ‘homework battle’. David came through to get himself a drink. He hugged his mother from behind and kissed her on the top of the head. She stroked his arm and he stroked back. He smiled at us and went back to his game in the other room.

  ‘For a lawnge toyme we didn’t go any place. We just stayed home. PS, everything was so expensive.’

  Saying ‘PS’ and adding a postscript to her own sentences was one of Joyce’s interesting speech tics. She did it all the time when telling a story and it made the telling even more mesmerising. P looked out at the small neat yard around the small neat house and knew that fate had confined her to this suburban patch of Long Island. The British moan about the National Health Service but if your kid is ill it doesn’t suck your finances dry. As if their troubles with David have not been enough, Joyce’s oldest boy had also had difficulties.

  ‘The kids were over near the Carvel,’ Joyce said, as if I would know where that was and of course, in a way, I did. The Carvel is the ice-cream stand near the centre of any small New York town. I have never been to Amityville before but I don’t doubt for a moment that I could find it.

  There was some trouble and Matt got hit on the head and back with a metal bar.’

  The injury was serious and has affected him. Joyce was anxious about him. ‘He should be applying for college now.’

  Of course he should. It is part of the aspirational American way for almost everyone to go to college now. When I was a kid, finishing high school was still the big deal. People were embarrassed if they didn’t get their high school diplomas; now it is all about degrees. Mall recovered from the attack and then one of his closest friends killed himself ‘two days before the prom’. Another friend died of meningitis at school. Matt, she said, had become cautious and wanted to stay at home. Marooned perhaps, as Joyce and Alan have been, in their nice, safe house. Understandably, Joyce was worried about her kids growing up on the ‘eyeland’. She explained that many of the youngsters from Amityville go away to college, don’t make it and come back early. They don’t want to leave this narrow strip of land. Maybe we all just want to be at home.

  Joyce was the perfect hostess. I explained how interested I was in the area and she took us for a drive. On the surface Amityville hinted at none of the troubles which worry Joyce. The town looked sleepy with its neat bandstand, small shops and closed museum. It was the website image of The Friendly Village’, a ‘Tree City of USA’ on which you can hear rather a jolly tune called The Codfish Ball. If it had been up to me I would have gone to a bookshop and a place that sold the medal-winning Long Island wine but Joyce’s choice was much more interesting. She took us down to the water. Down to the beach area where Matt works as a lifeguard in the summer. We looked out across South Oyster Bay to the narrow sands of Jones Beach where I had once got spectacularly sunburnt on a summer’s outing with the Gladyses.

  En route we drove past all the waterfront properties that represent the big money in the area. Many of the large houses backed on to canal-like fingers of water running parallel to the streets. Here, boats as big as houses were neatly parked.

  ‘You get a lot of flooding in the winter,’ Joyce explained. ‘PS, It happens in the spring also.’

  To prove the problem, one house had been lifted wholesale up in the air and was in the process of being made eight foot taller than it was before. We drifted past in Joyce’s car and could see the men working underneath it. Stripped of its clapboard coating the place looked like a giant doll’s house made entirely of wood and paper.

  It was an interesting trip. Not just into the area but into Joyce’s dreams. Each place had been carefully earmarked over the years by her as to whether or not she wanted to live in it. As we drifted leisurely along she talked about the Junior League to which she belongs. Strictly speaking it is the Junior League of the Amityville Women’s Club whose ‘primary purpose’ is to ‘raise funds that are donated to local community groups and national charitable organisations’. It also provides scholarships for students living in the town. It is clearly an important focus for Joyce. Apparently the big event for the Junior League is their Holiday Homes Tour at Christmas which she mentioned frequently. Seve
ral local homes are decorated for the festive season and then several hundred people pay $10 each to look around them. (Tickets available mid-November at Johnson’s Florist, Amy’s and Self-Image Salon, downtown Amityville.) This year there are five homes including the properties of Mr and Mrs Nick Rosser, Mr and Mrs Skip Weir, Mr and Mrs Paul Schmidt, Mr and Mrs Norman Rafsol and Mr Donald Boyd. I don’t know why Mr Boyd wanted to keep in with the women’s Junior League and I certainly don’t know why the female members of a women’s club had all been happy to have neither a first nor a last name of their own.

  The fund-raising clincher had been the days when the previous owners of 112 Ocean Avenue allowed their house to be included in this tour.

  ‘It was great when it was the “horror” house but not any more. The people don’t even like you to stop outside,’ explained Joyce. She didn’t like to stop outside either. The people of Amityville are naturally reticent about the whole thing. The official statement says, ‘In regard to the village’s reluctance to discuss the subject, this kind of publicity trivializes the death of six members of the DeFeo family,’ who were, after all, friends and neighbours of people still living there. It is understandable but I couldn’t help but gawp as we drove by.

  We headed up to the yacht club where Joyce turned the car around in the drive.

  ‘Everyone is a member except us, of course,’ she explained. ‘I go there so often with my friends I think they think I’m a member.’