The Red Parts

by Maggie Nelson

  In early October, about a month before Schroeder’s call, I sent galleys of Jane to my mother for her sixtieth birthday. I was nervous; I knew the book would immerse her in the details of a story she’d been trying to put behind her for thirty-five years. More than nervous—I was terrified. As I addressed the package to her in California, it occurred to me that the book might not constitute a gift at all. If she hated it, it could be construed as a birthday-ruining disaster, a bomb, a betrayal.

  I was hugely relieved when she called me after finishing the manuscript. She was in tears, saying she would be eternally grateful both to it and to me. She said it was a miracle: even though I never knew Jane, somehow I had managed to bring her back to life.

  This felt like a miracle to me too. I never thought “my Jane” might approximate the “real Jane”; I never even had designs on such a thing. But whoever “my Jane” was, she had certainly been alive with me, for me, for some time. The book’s cover had been designed and pinned to my wall for months, and a defiant, androgynous, starkly lit, close-up photo of Jane’s face at thirteen, taken by my grandfather, stared me down daily. The book also contained many diary entries I had culled from Jane’s own writings, so copyediting the manuscript—which is what I had been doing when my mother called that November afternoon—involved paying as close attention to Jane’s voice as I paid to my own.

  To make sure I had her right, I had unearthed Jane’s original journals, and it was not unusual that fall to find me sitting on the dark wood floor of the Ponderosa Room in a sea of pages filled with her elegant handwriting. In returning to them I was newly struck by their tormented insecurity (often manifesting itself in torrents of rhetorical, self-reprimanding questions), which contrasts starkly—sadly, even—with her obviously deep powers of articulation and feeling. This contrast runs through all her writings, from her childhood to her college years. More than runs through them—it is their very engine. It was, in fact, what made me want to write about her in the first place, as much as, or more than, the weird and awful circumstances of her death.

  Never be afraid to contradict yourself. But what is there to contradict? Could I after all be very stupid—and very wrong? You’re a good kid, Jane. Good for what? Who am I to judge? What was 1965? What’s been learned? What’s been gained? Lost? Loved? Hated? What do you really think? How do you explain yourself? Why don’t I ever know what I’m going to be tomorrow? What right have we to happiness?

  I recognized myself here, although I did not want to. I would have rather chalked Jane’s self-doubting agonies up to the conundrum of growing up an effusive, probing, ambitious girl in the sedate, patriarchal ‘50s—a conundrum that several decades of feminism were supposed to have dissolved and washed away by the time I came across her words.

  And now a detective had called to say that there had been a DNA match in her case, and they were sure they’d found the right guy—a retired nurse who had nothing to do with John Norman Collins, the man who was convicted in 1970 of the final Michigan Murder, and whom most had always assumed responsible for all. Schroeder told us that this new suspect was now under surveillance, and would be arrested within a few weeks. They had every reason to believe that the case would then move swiftly toward a successful conclusion.

  Leiterman was in fact taken into custody on the charge of open murder on the day before Thanksgiving, 2004, and then held, without bail, until his trial, which began on July 11, 2005, and ended on July 22, 2005. But over these eight months, the dread that had accompanied my initial forays into Jane’s story did not dissipate.

  It shape-shifted. It grew.

  AS WINTER descended in Middletown, the sunroom became the snowroom, and murder mind was back. In the morning I would pretend to know how to teach Shakespeare to fresh-faced undergraduates, then return home to talk on the phone to homicide cops and sift through the stack of books I’d checked out from the university’s Science Library to try to keep up with the developments in Jane’s case: DNA for Dummies, clinical psychology textbooks with titles like Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides. I flipped through the case studies in Sexual Murder only once but still felt as though they might have given me a fatal disease. At night I often found myself up late, unable to sleep, pacing around the Ponderosa Room in my pale blue bathrobe, a tinkling glass of whiskey and ice in my hand, watching the snow mount menacingly around the windows. I began to feel like a ghost, a stranger to myself. It wasn’t quite as bad as The Shining, but sometimes it felt close. At least Jack Nicholson had a family to witness and rue his descent. At more jocular moments I felt like John Berryman—a throwback, a poet trapped in a gothic college town, some scraggly miscreant academic who went to dreary parties, swapped wives, and occasionally defecated, blind drunk, on a colleague’s lawn. Except that in Middletown there were no such parties.

  In short the ideal of catharsis that had served as a naive but real spur throughout my writing of Jane began to crack at the seams, and reveal itself as the ruse I had suspected it to be all along. My identification with my aunt—which had been the main thread of Jane, and which was arguably a result of mistaken identity on the part of my grandfather, who has called me “Jane” instead of “Maggie” for as long as I can remember—began to feel like either a hoax or a horror. I had started writing Jane with the presumption that my family’s repression of her awful death was an example of faulty grieving, which my book could delicately expose as an unhealthy vestige of a Midwestern, Scandinavian heritage—a grim Ingmar Bergman scenario getting played out in the small, lakeside town of Muskegon, Michigan—and that I could offer a more successful model in its place.

  The hubris of this idea is now abundantly clear to me. When I think now about “faulty” or “successful” grieving, I feel only bewilderment. Beyond the bewilderment, the edge of a shapeless, potent rage—a rollicking protest, some loose, hot, wild event starting to take place under my skin.

  Photo #1:

  A ring of male detectives standing around the shrouded lump of Jane’s dead body. Taken from behind the chain-link fence, looking into Denton Cemetery. The picture cuts off around the men’s waists, so all you see of them is a row of trench coat bottoms and matching black shoes. Jane’s body lies at their feet, her head and upper body shrouded by her raincoat. One of her arms strays out from under it, ghostly white, flung above her head, as if she were not dead, just completely exhausted.

  An Inheritance

  IN ONE OF HIS last psychoanalytic papers, D. W. Winnicott wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced. This statement has always been a source of great comfort to me. For years I took it to mean that the other shoe has already dropped, that you’ve already been to the place you fear the most, that you’ve already come back from it.

  It’s only lately that I’ve realized that Winnicott is not suggesting that breakdowns do not recur. Now I see that he may be suggesting just the opposite: that a fear of breakdown in our past may be precisely what causes it to repeat in our future.

  TO GET HOME to Muskegon for her spring break in late March 1969, Jane requested a ride via the campus ride board at the University of Michigan. She was going home to announce her engagement to her boyfriend, Phil, a professor of economics and fellow campus activist. Knowing her parents would not approve, she was going home alone to give them time to adjust to the news before Phil joined her a few days later. Over the telephone she arranged for a ride with a man who, unbeknownst to her, was using an alias. Phil said good-bye to her around 6:30 P.M. in her room at the Law Quad; her dead body was found about fourteen miles outside of Ann Arbor the following morning. She died from two gunshots to the head—one in her left temple, the other in her lower left skull. After she was dead, or fast approaching death, she was strangled viciously with a stocking that did not belong to her. Her body was dragged onto a stranger’s grave in a small, rural cemetery called Denton Cemetery, at the end of a gravel road known locally as a “lover’s lane.” Her jumper was pulled up,
her pantyhose pulled down, her belongings meticulously arranged between her legs and around her body, which was then covered with her raincoat and abandoned.

  After Jane’s murder—which was the third in a series of seven—my mother began to worry that she might be the next victim. As the case went unsolved, she kept worrying. Even visiting her sister’s grave was a fraught enterprise, as the police had told the family that Jane’s murderer might visit also. To mourn Jane was literally to risk encountering her killer.

  Writing Jane, I realized this fear had trickled down to me also. An inheritance. I also knew from years of watching movies that the female detective—or, another favorite, the female professor—always has to pay for her curiosity and toughness by becoming the target of the killer himself. One man is copying the most notorious killers in history. One at a time. Together, two women must stop him from killing again. Or they’re next, reads the tagline for the 1995 serial-killer flick Copycat, starring Sigourney Weaver as an alcoholic, agoraphobic professor of “serial killer studies” and Holly Hunter as her counterpart, the tough female dick.

  I tried to find a sense of humor about the cinematic, self-aggrandizing images I had of discovering some crucial piece of evidence that the “professionals” had overlooked, or of someday reading from Jane at a bookstore with her killer clandestinely seated in the audience. I reminded myself that Jane’s murderer might well have been John Collins, and told myself that even if Collins hadn’t done it, her murderer might no longer be alive—or if he was, he was likely in prison for something else. Or, even if he was alive and free, the chances were close to nil that he would ever find his way to a book of poetry, even if my aunt’s picture were on the cover. It was one of the few moments in my life in which poetry’s obscure cultural status felt heartening.

  Any two-bit shrink, or fellow writer, could have pointed out that the danger I feared from my aunt’s phantom murderer—along with my closet hope that my project might somehow conjure him up—was but an extreme, ready-made metaphor for all the wild hopes and fears that can accompany the act of writing itself, especially writing about family stories that one’s family would rather leave untouched, untold. Several did, in fact, point this out.

  That all seemed true enough, until Schroeder called and collapsed the metaphor.

  WHEN JANE COMES out in March 2005, Schroeder will go through each poem with a highlighter. We will correspond about some details—where I got the information about the timing of a phone call Jane supposedly made on the night of her murder, if I know where he might find the guest book from Jane’s funeral that I mention, and so on.

  I can honestly say that it’s the first book of poetry I’ve ever read, he will write.

  I will write back, equally honestly, that it’s the first I’ve ever written to be highlighted by a homicide detective.

  IN THE WEEKS leading up to Leiterman’s arrest, I couldn’t stop myself from asking Schroeder if he thought Leiterman posed any danger to me or my family. It was an embarrassing question; it seemed to hoist years of pent-up irrationality into the light of day. But it was more discomfiting to think that a man who had been the object of generations of family fear was now getting up each morning, chatting with his family, and going about his daily business with no clue of his imminent arrest, or of the daily flurry of phone calls now taking place between my family and the Michigan State Police. The police had also made it clear that under no circumstances could he find out about the investigation, for fear he might flee, injure himself, or injure another.

  Schroeder answered me kindly. He told me not to worry—that Leiterman was like a down-and-out Santa Claus with a bad heart and a fierce addiction to painkillers. Let’s just say he’s not going to be climbing through any windows. He added that although he, Schroeder, hadn’t met me yet, he’d be willing to bet that at the very least, I would be able to outrun the guy.

  IF YOU WERE to ask my mother a few years ago how Jane’s murder affected the upbringing of her two daughters, she would have said that it did not. In a television interview that she and I eventually granted to a show from CBS, 48 Hours Mystery, during Leiterman’s trial, my mother told the attractive, busty interviewer that she thought she had always been too “in control” to allow her sister’s death to affect her behavior in any substantive way. The realization that she may not have been as “in control” as she imagined—a realization delivered, in part, by reading Jane, which chronicles the many years she spent barricading doors, etc.—startled her.

  My mother remains equally startled by the fact that her body gets hungry, has to go to the bathroom, or reacts to environmental factors such as altitude or temperature. She dreams of an impermeable, self-sufficient body, one not subject to uncontrollable needs or desires, be they its own or those of others. She dreams of a body that cannot be injured, violated, or sickened unless it chooses to be.

  Recently my mother tripped while speaking to my sister Emily on the phone. She fell to the ground in her kitchen, and her tooth smashed up against her upper lip. Her lip was swollen beyond recognition for weeks, and the tooth died; eventually she had to have a root canal. On the phone, my sister had no idea that she had fallen, because our mother talked right through it. When Emily and I bug her about this cover-up after the fact, she protests, What purpose could it possibly have served to tell Emily that I’d had an accident? She couldn’t have helped me, and it only would have made her worry.

  She says the fall was too embarrassing to mention. I say that it might have been worth mentioning simply because it happened. We may as well be talking to each other from opposite ends of a cardboard tube.

  By the time my mother and I find ourselves at the 48 Hours interview, seated side by side in a wainscoted room at the U of M Law School that CBS has taken over for the shoot and lined with fruit, coffee, and cookies, it is the last day of Lieterman’s trial, and we will have spent weeks looking at autopsy photos of Jane projected on a big screen in the courtroom. I will have started to understand where my mother’s fantasy of a sovereign, impermeable self might have come from.

  A medical examiner had described each of these photos out loud at the January hearing. There was no jury then, and thus no need for projected pictures. As the examiner spoke, tears streamed involuntarily from my eyes, from my sister’s eyes. But my mother did not cry. Her body simply collapsed in on itself. Her shoulders rounded over, her chest hollowed out, her whole body becoming more and more of a husk. Her knees shaking in spasms. I wanted to touch her but I didn’t know what kind of touch would help. First I tried pressing my hands down lightly on the top of her shaking thighs, then I put a hand to her back. She did not respond to either. It was clear that she had entered a world beyond touch, a world beyond comfort.

  My sister and I escaped to the bathroom at a break, and there Emily told me that she could barely look at our mother. She simply could not bear to see her in so much pain. I agreed, but did not confess to the less-admirable emotion. I also felt angry. I wanted our mother to meet these details with squared shoulders. I couldn’t bear the way this man’s words were shriveling her body into that of a little girl. I didn’t want her to turn away; I didn’t want her to shake. As I watched my beautiful sister wash and dry her hands and apply lipstick I tried to imagine how I’d feel if I were looking at autopsy photos of her on a big screen instead of Jane; the thought brought a quick flash of guilt and paralysis, followed by a wave of nausea. This was my mother’s sister. What was I expecting?

  You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father’s service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice, writes Angela Carter in her retelling of the Bluebeard myth.

  In Carter’s version of the story, Bluebeard does not murder his young bride. Instead h
er mother arrives in the nick of time and puts “a single, irreproachable bullet” through Bluebeard’s head.

  Is this what I was hoping for?

  The Face of Evil

  He has come to gas the house and I am chained into a large birdcage that clangs against everything when I walk around. I’m trying to get up the stairs in the cage but it’s hard. He acted very affectionate and kind when he came to gas the house and yet I knew he was going to kill me. Clearly he is deranged. I clang my way out of the house, noticing that he has duct-taped all the vents, etc. I burst out onto a lawn which slopes down into mud, toward a river. The mud feels amazingly green and wet and good, very real. I know instantly that the mud is the savior, the mud is the antidote to the poison gas. Later when he comes back he tries to act unsurprised that I am still alive, but he is obviously quite surprised. I hog-tie him and put him in a black garbage bag and go to burn him alive. I am thinking, I know this is only a dream, but am I really going to let myself do all these aggressive and violent things? I muse for a moment on how heavy the bag will probably be because he is such a big guy, but being a dream it doesn’t give me any problem. Once he is tied up and in the bag he doesn’t make any noise anymore, it’s like he’s ceased to exist.

  AND SO I HAVE dreamt for years of confronting some sinister, composite epitome of male violence and power, the murderer I always presumed to be Jane’s. Sometimes he is a faceless shadow; other times he has the face of someone I know. Sometimes my mother and sister are there, and we help each other. Other times we are all there but we don’t help each other, either because we can’t or we won’t. Most often I am alone.

  My only other image of Jane’s potential murderer was that of John Collins, who, at the time of his arrest, was a young, handsome white boy, and apparently quite the charmer. Lucky with the ladies, as they say.