Birdie made a choking noise, a mixture of self-deprecation and scorn. I held my thermos aloft and began wiping off the sides with a brown paper towel. Algeria scrubbed her large hands violently, sudsing them generously, and the discussion appeared to be finished, though I knew it would be resumed and extended ad infinitum in the hours, days, weeks, and months to follow.
As I deposited the paper towel into the trash can and turned to walk back to my office, I glanced at Birdie’s face, bent over the large tray of bread slices while she methodically brushed them one by one. Her features were set in lines at once mournful and indignant, and I knew that the taking in of the horrible truth concerning Susan Smith was to require excruciating effort on Birdie Freeman’s part. Though she did not look at me when I passed her, she addressed me. “How a mother could do that, Margaret—it just doesn’t make sense, does it? There’s got to be something more to it than we’ve heard on the news.” Clearly, she was still giving Susan Smith the benefit of the doubt.
No, I thought, though I did not speak aloud, wanton cruelty and deception make no sense whatsoever in your safe and orderly world, Birdie Freeman. Had you sojourned in a strange land as I have, you would know that evil needs nothing, certainly nothing as cold and fixed as logic, to grow and thrive. Evil breeds upon itself and multiplies to horrific proportions.
Had Birdie Freeman eaten at the same table with me, she would have expected from others no pleasant bread, no cup to quench her thirst, no strong hand to shield her from injury, no reason to explain corruption. Had her eyes seen what mine have seen, she could have easily envisioned manifold scenes of human depravity, including that of a young mother watching her innocent children, utterly dependent upon her, roll down a ramp into the dark waters of a lake.
It is the helplessness of the two boys—and all victims of all crimes—that incites me not to compassion but to anger. I recently read parts of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire and was drawn to its premise of protection by a society of friends. Although I put the book aside for its disturbing coarseness, I could not help contemplating the direction my life might have taken had such a society been available to me after my mother’s death, had there been even one person to love and defend me, to seek retribution against my grandfather on my behalf.
But I seek no pity. There is security in having known the worst.
14
Every Evil Work
I shrink from the chapter at hand. While I have been viewing it with dread from afar, as if through a spyglass, I have been powerless to stay its inexorable approach. Now that it has arrived, I wish to skirt around it, if not to flee from it altogether, at least to fend it off while I grasp for other material to place before it. Yet I know that my tale will fall short of its mark if I guard this secret. It must be told.
For years I have striven, on the one hand, to eradicate from my mind the memories that I am preparing to divulge, yet on the other, to shelter them from such expunction. Such ambivalence is common in cases of tragedy, I suppose, and quite simple to strip to its cause, for while the yearning to forget originates from the final tragedy itself—that relatively brief moment in literal time of inexpressible anguish—the pleasure of remembering finds its source further back and over a greater expanse of measurable time. To forget the tragedy, one would have to erase from his mind all things relevant to it, for the ending is fused with the context. To divorce the tragedy from the prior happiness, therefore, becomes impossible, and in a sense, I believe, undesirable.
I admit, even as the reader must recognize, that these ramblings are merely additional tactics of postponement, but the reader must permit me to creep forth at my own pace.
Four years ago I read a novel by Mary McGarry Morris titled A Dangerous Woman. The protagonist, a pathetic figure named Martha Horgan, was the dangerous woman. I was puzzled by the title at the outset of the story, for though Martha Horgan was many things—feeble-minded, clumsy, inept, despised, stubborn, unlovely—she did not seem in the least dangerous, that is, not at first. However, in the course of my reading, I soon understood that because no one loved her, Martha Horgan’s final act in life could be nothing but destructive, to herself certainly but most likely to others as well. (One is not labeled “dangerous” if he brings harm only to himself.)
My predictions proved true, for by the end of the book Martha Horgan did indeed inflict severe and irreversible damage upon others. The thesis of Mary McGarry Morris’s novel, as I see, is this: A person who knows no love is dangerous; that is, he is ripe for the carrying out of indefinably malicious and despicable acts against his fellowman. It matters not whether the mental faculties of the unloved individual are acute or sluggish. The potential danger is equally grave.
Miss Morris’s book left its mark upon my mind, not only for its superlative integration of life and art but also for the posing of a timely question. Is one truly and perpetually accountable for his conduct? Was Martha Horgan’s culminating crime to be laid at her feet, or was it the fault of others—her callous-hearted aunt, the man who gently but nonetheless knowingly misused her, the co-worker who pointedly spurned her friendship, the great whole of society who should have taken note of her loveless state but did not?
Freedom from personal accountability is busily promoted in today’s media, the word victim being bandied about at every turn. Lawyers for confessed murderers routinely dredge up and exhibit the unhappy circumstances of a client’s past in an attempt to obscure the truth that a life was taken at the killer’s hand. Was Martha Horgan guilty? Was Susan Smith guilty? Yes, I vehemently reply. An individual must bear the responsibility for his own actions.
Yet one could question—indeed one has questioned—whether my principles are consistent in matters closer to my own heart. In recent months I have given considerable thought to my personal responsibility. To clarify, am I guilty? Though certainly I have not committed a capital offense, am I to be held culpable for lesser peccadilloes—for instance, my misanthropic spirit toward my fellowman? Or, given my history, am I not justified in withholding from others my faith and affection? I have Birdie Freeman to thank for reducing the question of grand-scale guilt to the daily allowances I make for myself—that is for my inhospitable, though harmless, behavior toward others—for it was she who put the point to me one day in February. But I shall come to this later.
Unlike Martha Horgan, I am not a dangerous woman, for I have known love. In fact, were she a living human instead of a fictional character, Martha Horgan would surely deem me a child of fortune, for I knew love two times before I reached the age of twenty.
My mother, were she living, would wish me to increase the number to three. “God loves you, Margaret,” she whispered to me as a child each night at bedtime. Mother’s favorite Bible passage was Psalm 103, a chapter that I had memorized in its entirety by the time I was six years old and that we frequently quoted together after supper in the evenings. When Mother died and left me alone, however, I grew to hate the words of the psalm, for I felt they mocked me and made light of the misery into which I was so suddenly pitched. Oftentimes in the deep of night at my grandfather’s house, phrases from the passage would come to me, and I would rail against them. “Forget not all his benefits! Who redeemeth thy life from destruction! Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things! So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s! The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all who are oppressed! For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him! Bless the Lord, O my soul!” I pulled the bedclothes over my head as I spat out the words and pronounced them lies.
At nighttime during those black years there festered within me a deep resentment toward my mother for having taught me such untruths and for having abandoned me. How could she have schooled me in empty promises, I reasoned, if she truly loved me? How could she have presented the canards of the Bible as facts? How could she have died and left me defenseless? At a level beyond my anger, however, I knew that she had loved me past all telling,
and in the daytime I knew that she would have died to protect me, though ironically, it was her dying that left me vulnerable.
Concerning the Bible, many of its words are firmly rooted in my mind. Though I reject their message, I nevertheless value them for their style. I often borrow phrases from this trove of biblical language, at times unwittingly. For instance, I had completed three chapters of the manuscript that I am presently writing when I realized that the titles I had chosen for all three were phrases from various books of the Bible—Matthew, Galatians, and Proverbs, to name them specifically. The idea appealed to me as a unifying device, and I purposed to continue selecting chapter titles from the Bible. Concerning chapter titles in general, I have noted in recent years their regrettable absence in contemporary works. I suppose some editors may consider them to be an inessential, perhaps even adolescent, heralding of the material to come. Nota Bene: It is my wish, however, should my manuscript ever make its way to a professional editor, that the chapter titles be retained.
I must delay the advancement of my story no longer. Before I had reached my twentieth birthday, as I said, I had known love twice. My first love, of course, was that of my mother. This was a mutual love, both received and given in unstinting abundance.
Now for the second. The previous chapter, in which I reported Birdie’s conduct during the shameful ordeal imposed upon the American public by Susan Smith, segues quite smoothly into the revelation that I am now at last ready to make known, for both include mother, child, and death by water.
I will state it now. Besides the love of a child for her mother, I have also known the love of a mother for her child. When I was eighteen years of age, I gave birth to a baby. Not having spoken of this in many years, I feel a shortness of breath; I smell the musty scent of fear; I hear the scrabbling of demons and the moaning of ghosts; I see the eerie flickering of uncertain lights as I enter the haunted house of my memories.
I was terrified for many reasons upon discovering that I was with child. Imagine yourself, if you will, as a girl of seventeen, utterly devoid of friendships with peers, teachers, neighbors, or relatives. Though required to attend church with oppressive regularity in the company of my grandparents and to present myself at various functions of the young people, I did not mingle well. The youth leader, an overeager man by the name of Lester Kirby, with the soft pink features of a toddler, told my grandparents that I seemed to intimidate the others with my standoffish attitude. I detested the church, I suspect, because of its high esteem of my grandfather, who was the elder in charge of financial disbursements. I viewed it as an altogether ignoble institution because of its failure to see and judge him for what he was.
At school I was shunned by teachers and fellow students alike, largely because of my supercilious manner toward the inferior instruction being passed off as education, but partly, I know now, because I had no idea how to go about making friends. I told myself that I did not need friends, but I would have given all that I had, including my considerable intellect—perhaps especially my intellect—to have had a single true friend to claim as my own. I often read of friendships, of course, and they seemed to me an exceedingly precious but elusive possession. I suppose my only friends were my books.
I was terrified, then, because I had no ally in my trouble, and I knew for a certainty that I had fallen headlong into trouble. I had learned by now that my grandmother was merely an extension of my grandfather, not as actively evil, but let us say willfully and adamantly ignorant. As a girl of thirteen, I had attempted one day to stammer out the truth to her about my grandfather’s offenses toward me, only to have her pummel my ears soundly and at great length and then order me never again to open my foul lips against “such a man of God,” as she called him.
She went on to impress upon me the debt of gratitude that I had accrued. “Your grandfather took me and your mother in when we didn’t have hardly a shoestring between us,” she said. “And he never once complained about having to support a child that wasn’t his own—not once! And he didn’t blame me, not ever, not a single time, for not being able to bear him any children to carry on his bloodline. He’s a Christian, Margaret! You know that! Ask anybody! He’s never once darkened the door of a saloon or so much as lit a cigarette! And here you are trying to soil his good name. You’re a wretched child, Margaret, stubborn just like your mother. She broke your grandfather’s heart when she sneaked away from home against his will, and I wouldn’t have blamed him a bit if he’d refused to take you in when they tracked us down after the accident.”
“I wish that he had refused,” I whispered, and she struck me again.
“You don’t deserve the good home we’ve given you!” she cried. “When they called us after the accident, your grandfather never even hesitated for a minute to think about taking you in! He welcomed you like you were his own flesh and blood. You better just fix whatever’s wrong with you to make you so mean and ungrateful, Margaret. I won’t have you spreading lies. Not one person would believe a little castoff like you anyway. You’d be taken away and locked up for libel and slander!”
The speech went on in this vein for some ten or fifteen minutes, after which my grandmother ordered me to the bathroom, where she placed in my palm a bar of soap and instructed me to “wash out your filthy mouth.” She stood by grimly to oversee the procedure, and as I choked and frothed, she commanded that I rinse and repeat the process.
The only person at Latham County High who smiled at me upon occasion was Mr. Wadworth, my chemistry teacher. He was the only teacher, I might add, whose knowledge of his subject seemed to me sufficiently thorough to be beyond challenge. Perhaps I could have gone to Mr. Wadworth had I known how to initiate a conversation in anything other than a confrontational manner, but even then there existed the inalterable difficulty of his being a man. How did I know whether he could be trusted? In 1961 teen pregnancy was not the common occurrence of today. And one certainly did not confide in a male teacher concerning such a delicate matter. Yet I have often wondered how he would have responded.
After realizing with an appalling shock that I was carrying a child, I endured a day—November 7, 1961—that I shall always equate with the word panic. I cringed to imagine the response of my grandparents upon learning of my condition. I could anticipate only two courses of action that they might take, and I could bear the thought of neither. Perhaps they would seek to terminate my pregnancy, after which time my life would resume as it had been, save perhaps for a more scrupulous monthly record keeping on my grandfather’s part. As I had an indescribable phobia of medical procedures and had read frightening stories of the particular procedure required to destroy a fetus, I was terrified of this possibility. Or perhaps my grandparents would choose for me to bear the child. If so, I was certain that they would portray me to the community as a promiscuous rebel to whom they continued, in their great kindness and unrequited charity, to offer refuge and material aid. Were I to identify the father of the child, no one would believe me. If I did not, I would become the object of scorn and eventually pity as, Hester Prynne-like, I would bear my shame alone.
The reader of today must wish to ask me this: “Why did you stay in a place where you were so grossly and repeatedly mistreated?” In today’s society of public assistance for abused women and children, of shelters for runaways, of hot lines for unwed mothers, it is perhaps easy to forget that these provisions were not available to the same degree some thirty or forty years ago.
Besides, I had no place to go. My grandparents had left their home in West Falls, Oregon, in 1925, a month after my grandfather had so mercifully taken to his bosom my grandmother and her four-year-old daughter—my mother—and had traveled by train to Marshland, New York, where they had settled, my grandfather having secured a position with a company that manufactured elevators. They had no relatives except those in Oregon, with whom they never corresponded and of whom I never heard them speak. When I asked my grandmother about her parents one day, I recall a clearly discernible cl
oud descending upon her spirit as she said faintly, “Oh, Margaret, all that was so long ago.”
As for returning to one of the cities where I myself had lived as a child and trying to establish contact with a sympathetic acquaintance, this prospect appeared hopeless. I had, in fact, once written a letter to the motherly Mrs. Gault, my former neighbor in Ohio, but had never received an answer. Whether my grandfather intercepted the letter, I do not know, though I suspect this to be true. Or perhaps Mrs. Gault had moved by then, or my letter was misdirected by the postal service. Perhaps the missive, in which my pleas for rescue were polite though quite direct, is even today wedged under the rubber conveyor belt of an antiquated letter sorter in some distant city.
I suppose my story gives testimony to the sense of total entrapment that one feels in an incestuous home, for in spite of my superior academic prowess, I had never seen fleeing my grandparents’ home as an option until November 8, 1961, at the age of seventeen years and five months. After the previous day of mad reckoning, however, my panic subsided and my course became plain. All at once I saw that I must flee. I suppose I do not fit the profile of the typical victim of incest, for what must become for many the nadir of disgrace—that is, the bearing of a child as a result of the sin—was for me the redeeming of my life from destruction, promised (but heretofore undelivered) in Psalm 103, of which I spoke earlier.
For two days after my decision to leave my grandfather’s house, I feigned illness, both to employ my time during the day in the laying of my plans and to keep my grandfather from my bed at night. I had tried the pretense of various maladies many times before, but to no avail. Either my grandfather did not care that he might be causing me additional discomfort as well as exposing himself to illness, or he saw through my deception. This time, however, I threw off all inhibitions and staged a drama that was persuasive enough to drive him from my room.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 18
