Richards turned slightly and faced her. The rest of the descent was made in silence.
JULY 9, 1985
25
Some months after Glenn Mackenzie died in the fall of ’82, Andrea Simone began to talk about the way he’d treated her. On July 8, 1985, Andrea received a call at her office at WCTX in Brighton from a woman who identified herself as Molly Dennis of the Battered Women’s Project. Dennis said that the office of the Norfolk County District Attorney was conducting a study of patterns in spousal abuse, in order to devise a program to combat its incidence. Andrea asked Dennis how she had secured Simone’s name; Dennis told her that all the project’s records and sources were confidential. Andrea agreed to take time from work to be interviewed on tape at 765 Providence Highway, Dedham. She went there the next day in the late afternoon and found the office in a cramped cubicle at the rear on the lower level of a shopping mall. Overhead there was a pet store. Andrea could hear dogs barking and people walking. She could smell something as well.
“At first I didn’t want to,” she said. “I didn’t want to say a word. That I’d lived through it and everything, outlasted the guy, and now it was over. And: just let it go, you know? The dead bury the dead. But then all these people started coming up to me and saying, well, wasn’t it a shame? And I started to think: ‘Hey, no, it wasn’t.’ You know? It wasn’t a shame at all. I wouldn’t exactly say I was glad that he was dead, I wouldn’t go that far. But if one of us had to be dead, well, I was glad it wasn’t me. And kind of surprised it wasn’t, too. Because it could’ve been. It could’ve been that way.”
She was five feet, nine inches tall and almost gaunt. She sat on the base of her spine in the wooden armchair with her legs spread out under her long grey cotton skirt and her bulky green cotton sleeveless sweater shapeless around her torso. She had long black hair with streaks of grey in it; she kept it back from her temples with gold barrettes over her ears. She let her hands dangle from the arms of the chair. “I guess I thought, that I just assumed, you know, that because these were people that’d known us a long time, that they must’ve seen how he was changing, and what I was going through. And that they just hadn’t said anything because I never did, and they assumed I wanted it that way. That I was handling it without any help from anybody, and I must not want any. And that was what stunned me, when they started coming up to me and trying to console me. See? That all these people we’d known for so long could’ve been so stupid.
“The first one,” she said, sitting up in the chair and fishing in her straw bag on the floor at her right, “well, not the first one — because there were quite a few that I just thanked them and said, you know, it was a shock — but the first one that I guess actually got to me finally was Mary. Mary Battaglia. Now Mary wasn’t one of our closest friends. Glenn went to BU with the guy she was living with, Homer, and Glenn sort of cultivated Homer afterwards because, well, you want the truth, I always suspected it was because Homer was black and Glenn didn’t have any other blacks that he knew really well, or could say he did. And so he needed Homer for that reason. Some, if somebody said he was a racist: ‘No, I’m not. I’m pals with Homer.’ And I think one the reasons, that we didn’t see that much of them after a while, was that Homer also suspected that was what Glenn was doing, and he didn’t like him for it.
“But anyway,” she said, taking a package of Carltons and a book of matches from the straw bag, “I was over in the Square one day about six months after Glenn died, just sort of poking around on a Saturday trying to find something I could get for my mother’s birthday. Which I go through every March because she’s so damned difficult to get anything for, and I never know what to buy. And I thought maybe there might be something she would like in one of the stores — like a book or a print or something. And I really didn’t have any idea. And I ran into Mary coming out of that art book store there on Boylston Street up from the travel agency, and she said: ‘Let’s have coffee; it’s been so long; I’ve been meaning to write to you and have you over; and I feel so bad; and: blah blah blah.’ Which is the way Mary is — that girl just never stops talking. She’s a very nice person and she’d do anything for you, but Glenn used to say about her that she never learned sequential reasoning, never mastered it. Got all the way through Syracuse and never found out how you get to Point B after you start at Point A.”
She pulled a cigarette out of the pack and dropped the pack back into her bag. She lit the cigarette and dropped the matchbook back into the bag. She reached with her left hand for the amber glass ashtray on the table next to her and pulled it nearer. “So, I was frustrated already. Before I ever ran into her. Because of my mother, you know, and trying to get something for her, and it was sort of drizzling and damp and cold out, and I said: ‘Why not coffee? Sure.’ And we went into this quick-lunch place across the street and sat in one of those little booths, and she just started pouring out her heart to me. All this sympathy, you know? And I said — well, I lost my temper, I guess. And it wasn’t the first time I’d been tempted to, either. And I said: ‘Mary, what are you telling me? Don’t you know what he was?’
“And she didn’t,” Andrea said. “She honestly did not. I said: ‘Mary, he changed. Glenn changed from when you first knew him and I first knew him, and all those good old days. When he found out, when they did the Plaza job there, and Sam and Beau James never even asked him, and he didn’t even find out about it until after it was done, that was when it dawned on him that Sam actually meant it. That Sam, when he stopped consulting him in the spring of Seventy-four, that it really was because Sam thought he was too soft. That he didn’t have the balls to be in the revolution. He was ‘too theoretical,’ Sam said. He didn’t have the rocks. And I said to her: ‘Mary, that was over nine years ago, all that stuff went down. And you didn’t see what it did to him?’
“And she said no, that she didn’t. That Homer told her at least a year before that, when Sam threw Glenn out, that he was getting worried about some things that Sam was saying, and that Beau Walker was saying, and that Glenn Mackenzie was also saying at that time, and they were either getting too radical for him or else he was getting too old for them, and he was pulling out. ‘And I just assumed,’ she said, ‘I just assumed that was what Glenn did too, later on. When we didn’t see Sam and Christina and Beau anymore, but we still did see you two. That Glenn’d just decided the same thing Homer’d decided, and he had pulled out too.’
“And I said,” Andrea said, “I said: ‘Well, Mary, you were wrong. Homer resigned. Glenn was fired. And I said to him when the word got out, when it was in the papers and everything about The Friary thing, I said to Glenn: “Are you nuts?” Because he was just moping around, you know? I said: “All these years you’ve been going around, always looking over your shoulder all the time, someone knocks on the door and you jump, you talk in your sleep and I wake up and you’re mumbling about them coming after you and catching you and that, and now you’re jealous of these guys that they’ve got for murder? Is there something wrong with you?” ’ And she was absolutely stunned.
“And I said to her: ‘Well, Mary, that was what he was. He, it was like when they pulled the Warwick job, the one down in Rhode Island ’cause Sam thought it might be getting hot, here in Massachusetts, and Glenn didn’t know or go, it was like he thought they’d really cut his balls off. Like he finally realized, he was really out. And he decided after that he had to prove he still had them. Still had his manhood and all. And the way he would do that was by force. By using force. On me.’
“And she was the first one I told,” Andrea said. “That was in March of Eighty-three, and Mary Battaglia was the first one I told. And she was shocked. And so was I. She was shocked because she never dreamed, and I was shocked because she hadn’t. And it started me, that started me on telling people, other people that knew us, that the Glenn Mackenzie they knew in the next eight years was not the Glenn Mackenzie I knew during those same years. That the one I knew used to tie me to the bed and hit
me if I refused to let him do it, until I finally let him do it so he would stop hitting me. And that he stuck things into me, and did things to me, things that were really awful. So that when he died, aged thirty-six, in Nineteen-eighty-two, it sort of came as a relief. Came as a relief to me.”
“Let me ask you something,” Dennis said. She sat on a secretarial chair behind a small grey metal desk. She wore a tan cotton suit and a white blouse with a brown knitted necktie. “Since you knew what he had done, all the things he’d done before he left the gang.…”
“ ‘Why’d I stay with him for so long if he was doing that to me?’ ” Andrea said. “ ‘Why didn’t I just leave him when that change came over him?’ ”
“Yes,” Dennis said. “And turn him in, as far as that goes. I mean, yours wasn’t the usual case where the woman has children, or she thinks with good reason that the police can’t protect her and the abuser’ll get out and come back and beat her up again or maybe kill her. You, you had the means, right at hand. If you’d gone to the police and told them Glenn Mackenzie, about the things you knew he’d done, he would’ve been arrested, jailed, and then put into prison for a very long time. I suppose it doesn’t matter now, since he’s dead and gone, but why didn’t you do that? Turn him in? Or at the very least just leave him, he was treating you like that?”
“She asked me the same thing,” Andrea said. She took a deep last drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out. She exhaled the smoke. “Mary asked me that that day, and everybody I’ve told since, they have asked me too. Which I think’s sort of made me, forced me to work it out in my own head, and I think I have.
“It was because,” Andrea said, “well, in the first place it was because he didn’t always do it. I mean, it wasn’t like it was always happening. The first time — they had the Christmas party at the law firm, and I was working on some big deal production Buster Knowlton was behind schedule on at the station, so I couldn’t go. Which was really all right with me because those parties’d become a drag. I thought they had, at least. Here’re all these rads in flannel shirts and corduroys and workboots, standing around in these depressing offices they’ve got down in the South End, getting smashed or stoned or both, talking about justice for the poor. And their hair’s beginning to fall out and they’re getting middle-aged, whether they like it or not. And I just got sick of it. I don’t mean they weren’t sincere. I don’t mean I didn’t think what they were doing, what they wanted to do, wasn’t good — and if they could actually do it, it would be wonderful. But I was sick of it, you know? All this crap about the establishment, and the government, and the stinking rich and equal rights — I believed it all, and I still do. Most of it at least. But I was fed up with hearing about it all the time, you know? I guess I was bored.”
“Do you know,” Dennis said, “not that it probably matters, but did that law firm, so far as you know, did that law firm ever make money?”
“I don’t know,” Andrea said. “Well, I mean, I know there was a long time it didn’t, because Glenn never had any, and like when Zeke said it was time to pay the rent, or Glenn, when one of Glenn’s tuition loan payments came due, he would come to me and ask me for another one his ‘loans.’ Which he never paid back. And if I had it, which I usually didn’t because I was, all the money from my job was going for the rent on the apartment and the stuff we ate and stuff, if I had it I would give it to him. And if I didn’t, I would write, or call, and ask my father, you know, and like tell him it was for me, and I would give it to Glenn.
“But then,” she said, “then it did start finally to make some money. The law firm, I mean. At least Glenn stopped asking me, so I assume he must’ve been getting it from the practice. And he actually, he actually paid the rent on the damned apartment a few times. And we bought this new car. Well, not new, but it was a pretty good second-hand Jeep. And Glenn paid for that. So something was improving.”
“And when would that’ve been?” Dennis said.
“Ohh,” Andrea said, “this would’ve been …, I’m not really sure when it was. Because whenever it was, it wasn’t something like, that got announced. He was gone, this was in the summer, seventy-eight, and he was gone for a long time. And he told me, he said he had this hush-hush project somewhere down in Connecticut or something, I don’t know where it was, and I wouldn’t be able to get in touch with him. So I figured, with Sam and the others on trial, maybe he was afraid he’d have to testify, and he was cutting out. But I wasn’t really sorry. That I’d never see him again, even if he didn’t have the balls to tell me — anything that stopped him from hitting me. And then he came back, and I let him, and he did, he had stopped. And then I just sort of woke up to the fact one day that Glenn hadn’t been asking me for money for quite a while. And I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to give him the idea maybe he should’ve been. And besides, I thought maybe he was robbing stuff again. That that was where he’d been. Off with some new guys. But I really don’t know.”
“Did he leave you any money?” Dennis said.
Simone laughed. “Well,” she said, “if he did, I haven’t found it. I don’t know how much he had.”
“But it was after he started beating you up?” Dennis said. “See, one of the things we’re finding, often when the batterer’s under financial pressure, the likelihood of that being a contributing factor seems to be fairly high.”
“It could be,” Andrea said. “There could’ve been some of that. For a while, at least. But then, if it was that, just the money, well, it must’ve run out or something. Because he started whacking me again. No, it wasn’t dough.
“The first time,” she said, “I got home that night before he did, this would’ve been Seventy-four, Christmas of Seventy-four. It’d been a bad year all round, first with Sam just reading Glenn out of the Contingent, and then Glenn hearing about the Warwick job, and then when they killed Emmy in the fall. I mean, by then the only times I ever heard anything about what was going on, going on with them, I mean, was when Sam got bored or something, and decided to call Glenn up at the office and read him out for going soft. Tell him what a loser he was.” She paused. “Which he was, of course, when I think about it now. But he didn’t like hearing about it then. And then Sam would brag about all these wonderful things they were doing, that Glenn didn’t have the balls. So I’m just really, I’m just assuming they killed Emmy, that it had to’ve been them. Nobody told me that. But anyway, I didn’t feel much like Christmas and I got home and he wasn’t there.
“And I really didn’t mind. I suppose it was one or so, after midnight at least, and I was really beat. So I took off my clothes and I got in bed, and I was almost asleep, and that’s when he came in. And he was plowed. I don’t know what he’d had, or how he’d gotten home, but he was about one step away from where one more drink, or one more joint, or one more anything, and he would’ve just passed out. Which from my point of view, it would’ve been better if he’d had them, and not come home at all. And he woke me up and started mauling me. That was the first time. Compared to the ones that came after, it really wasn’t that bad. I didn’t scream or anything, though I would like to’ve. But it was a nice apartment we had then, in Allston, and I was afraid if we started making a lot of noise, you know, the middle of the night, we’d get thrown out of it. So I tried to fight back and naturally he was too strong, and too big and too smashed, and he hurt me enough so I said to myself: ‘All right, this isn’t going to work. Your roommate for some reason wants to rape you, let him do it. Deal with this in daylight when the bastard’s sobered up.’ Because I’d never seen him like that.
“And I thought I did,” she said. “I thought I did deal with it. The next morning was a Saturday and I got him up around noon and sat him down in the kitchen with his hangover and all, and I said to him: ‘All right, Glenn Mackenzie, now tell me what’s going on.’ And he said he didn’t remember.”
“Did you let him get away with that?” Dennis said.
“I certainly did not,” An
drea said. “I gave him chapter and I gave him verse. I read him the riot act. I don’t mean I was yelling, because I was not. I was perfectly calm. Well, maybe not calm. I was really very mad. But I was perfectly rational. I told him everything he’d done to me and I said to him: ‘Now Glenn, I want an explanation. Because I’m not going to take this kind of shit from you or anybody else. You want to stay out late and get shitfaced, go ahead and do it. You want to come home and get laid, even if you are shitfaced, you ask me nice and you know me, I’ll probably go along. But I’m not going to have you knocking my teeth out because you did too much drugs or had too much booze before you got home. That I won’t stand for.’
“And he was very apologetic,” she said. “Very contrite. Said he’d had some stuff, most likely acid in the punch or some fucking thing like that, and he’d never done it before and he’d never do it again.
“I took his word,” she said. “What the hell did I know? When Glenn came out to San José State in Nineteen-sixty-nine, and Beau and I met him, he was the nicest, sweetest guy you’d ever hope to meet. I don’t mean how he talked, his rhetoric and stuff. He was just as wild and off the wall when he talked as the other guys were then. Maybe even wilder, because he was from the east but he didn’t go to Harvard and therefore had more to prove. But personally he was a very sweet guy. And anyway, I agreed with all the stuff that those guys were saying then: Out of Vietnam, and justice for the poor. The talk did not scare me — any other kind of talk would’ve put me off. ‘If you don’t worship Ché, you know, I got no time for you’ — I was nineteen years old, for God’s sake. That’s the way I was then. So, from the minute I saw Glenn, I just adored him. And I went and told Beau, who’s only twenty-three or so himself and we’re all consequently very dramatic about everything that happens, I went and told Beau I was not going to be available any more. Because that was one of the things at the time that everybody did: we were all against property. And that meant that whatever belonged to anybody else in the Contingent belonged to all of us. And that included each other. We were pure communists, pure in everything, and in our commune that meant that if anybody asked you to fuck, or suck, or anything else, and you weren’t sick or something, you had to go through with it or else have a pretty good explanation for not following the party line.
Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) Page 21
