When I lay on the kitchen floor looking up at the cupboards that had no doors, but fabric gathered on cords, I noticed that the forest feast region, from the navel to the middle of the thighs, was also a cupboard. They had tried to open it to take something out, and now I lay here where nobody liked me because they hadn’t been able to get it open.
If I were my brother, I would have changed my name too; he was forced to be a swine by the fatherstone (the stoneswine also known as the deceased), and he has bolted from the pigsty. New chapter: William Jesard, man with swine-free conduct.
But what should I call it then?
Narrator
The groin, pure and simple.
Viv
If people used all the time they spend thinking about sex thinking about justice, the world would look very different – stay a virgin throughout the sexual revolution, then things would get done. Simply run a comb through the hair and then off you go. Or a hat, then you save on shampoo.
Today I took a picture of a strip bar, standing outside were some people who could have been circus folk, but they were in fact some kind of sexcrobats, one was doing a handstand, and her dress had slipped down to the waist so her trousers could be seen; the other one, who was missing a shoe, was wearing a brocade dress and over that a man’s shirt of the kind I like to wear; they stood under the sign that flashed its promise of a striporama into the afternoon, looking simultaneously cheerful and miserable. Only people as grubby as them would feel like touching their grubby faces and hands and breathing the grubby air that surrounded them.
Narrator
Maybe you should just dig into the memory of the Daddy song, then we’ll be done with the incestuous or semi-incestuous all at once… What do you say…? Then it’s over and done with, and together we can travel down less beaten paths. You might just happen to take an interest in the opposite sex, or what do I know, the same one. By the way, wasn’t there a tall Indian in a supermarket in Las Vegas that you – with resentment – saw walk towards the exit and drive out of your life in a dusty pick-up? Dig deeper. I continue to find it a little bit odd that you love romances but shrink back from so much as squeezing someone’s hand; oh your still chaste lips, horizontal and vertical alike, because isn’t it beautiful in French (which you mastered so quickly, but which always clung to your American, and vice versa: French coated with a thin film of American), le sourire vertical. Or, in order to contribute a little something myself: the lower smile. Upon what basis are you able to understand all these films that you see on your days off, Thursdays and Sundays, about magnetic fateful attraction between people (you who only invite people inside your box for the sixtieth of a second it takes your camera to take a picture)?
How can you free yourself from your parents if another loved one isn’t deployed in their place? If you don’t plunge into physical love, in which your entire existence is summed up, where you are hitched together, isolated, hitched together, isolated? Yes, I’m just asking. Well. Maybe it just calls for an extra-hard kick out of the nest.
Viv
Let me invite you inside a Man Ray photo from 1932. Unfortunately it’s untitled, but I call it ‘The Distorted Wheelhouse’. Very briefly: In a room with no straight lines… as seen through glasses with the entirely incorrect strength… the doors swell, the windows swell… a dark man with distorted features standing, turning a steering wheel… he turns a woman’s face in a circle around himself. Maybe the whole wretched business or the disruption – the lack of straight lines – is because the cabin is full of water.
That’s how it was when the Daddy song – ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ – came on the radio on the kitchen counter, in the old edition from ’38, sung by Mary Martin. We’re now in the post-war years, Mother and Father make another go of it, but it does not go well. Father has just left and slammed the door behind him, we hear him stomp down the stairs out in the stairwell, then we see him (from the kitchen window, Mother and I, at this point my brother has ridden off) appear downstairs on the sidewalk. Mother grabs my upper arm firmly, ‘Try running after him. Sing the Daddy song.’ Or maybe she says: ‘If nothing else: then sing the Daddy song. Get him to come back with you at any price, daughter.’ Or she says, casually, as though it is entirely irrelevant, because at that exact moment it comes on the radio for the umpteenth time: ‘Go and sing it to Father.’
I don’t understand why she wants him now when she was so happy to escape him in ’29. But there is after all a world war between then and now – you look at yourself in the mirror in a different way. At least until it has again become a habit that you’re alive.
Oh no – it must have been before the war.
Anyway, off I went – whenever it was. Down the stairs. Out on the sidewalk. Looked up at Mother, in the window. Across the street. Our house is situated on a bend. There’s something special about them, houses situated on a bend. I mean on a corner. There he is. I grab his coattails, he turns around and wants to brush me off, but then I open my mouth and break out in song. I don’t have a fur coat I can take off, a Siberian train station does not appear like in the musical, and the boys asking for more aren’t there either, but I stand up and weave around him, it’s Mother who is turning the steering wheel, I’m taller than Father, little Father, that won’t do, so I have to go down on my square knees, so it’s from down there that my heart belongs to him, Mother turns and turns, and I spin around Father dizzily until he says: ‘Stop that,’ but at that point I’ve got him turned (my storm my great Belgian horse my ship), and we return to the demented wheelhouse with Mother inside.
But the next time I didn’t get him to come back with me – then it was definitive. A departure for always. It was planned; a bluish-grey suitcase swinging in his hand.
I never saw him feel pain. (The glossy drunkenness I don’t accept.) I would have liked to see what that was like, just a glimpse of it. He was let off too lightly.
Ellen
Today something happened on the street, right outside our house. I was standing with Mom and Miss Maier in the garden watching. Joan’s brother came cycling along, and a car drove towards him, then Joan shouted at him from their yard, and he turned his head and answered her, and because he turned his head, he accidentally wobbled and ended up in the middle of the road. The car hit him, and he flew over the hood and over the roof and did a forward roll and (at first) landed on both feet on the road (it was the craziest stunt), but then he fell and hurt himself. The bicycle was completely crumpled. We all ran out to him, his and Joan’s mom also came racing over, and she shouted: ‘God, I thought it was the dog that had been hit.’
It was nothing serious, he could talk, nevertheless, they called an ambulance. He was wrapped up in a blanket and had to lie completely still, and now the dog had also arrived – his mom hugged it, and you can see that in the photo Miss Maier took, and which she gave to me as a gift.
Sarah
Today Viv came and wanted to sell me another picture. Funds must be running dry. It’s of me, from several years ago, where I stand in the schoolyard by a juice stand, and Ellen is sitting under the table. The party is over (whatever it was for, I can’t remember). The schoolyard is empty and abandoned. I look tired and irritable but slim, and where are all the children, have they run away from Ellen, since she has ended up alone, curled up under the table? Apparently I was not worried about it, that is clear to see.
I shook my head, because I didn’t want it. She didn’t understand. Maybe she thought that here I could see that I had also taken part in everyday life in the torrent of memorable, or not in the least memorable, events such as a juice stand, that I had not just worked my life away or stood on my head in the rose bed.
Peter
Something really ugly has happened, not close to us, but in the vicinity: a babysitter and her own little baby have been murdered in an odious manner. Viv is preoccupied by it, and it’s no wonder since it’s someone like her it happened to. She came storming in (as though her life was in danger and
she sought my protection) with the newspaper and put it down in front of me and smoothed it out, on the workbench, where I was making a shelf for Ellen.
12 September 1972
Chicago Tribune
MOTHER, BABY FOUND SLAIN
The beaten and naked bodies of a 27-year-old woman and her 18-month-old daughter were found yesterday morning in a church parking lot in Mount Prospect.
The woman, Mrs Barbara Flanagan of 5744 N. Meade Av. died from a sharp blow to the head or strangling, a coroner’s autopsy disclosed. The daughter, Renee, died of suffocation caused by vomiting after she had been sexually molested. The autopsy failed to disclose whether Mrs Flanagan had also been assaulted.
‘This is obviously the work of a deranged mind,’ said Mount Prospect Police Chief Bert Giddens.
A six-man team of Mount Prospect police canvassed the neighbourhood around the Community Presbyterian church at 407 N. Main St. Both bodies were found face up in the church’s parking lot. A gray blanket partially covered the woman.
A piece of electrical cord 2 feet long was found in the blanket. The cord could have come from the attacker’s car but apparently was not a murder weapon because the bodies did not bear marks that would come from a cord, the police said.
Police were combing a forest preserve district near Milwaukee Avenue and Imlay Street where Mrs Flanagan and her daughter were last seen at 3 p.m. Saturday when they left a Milwaukee Avenue bus there.
Mrs Flanagan’s husband Dennis, 30, said she was to meet a man who she said arranged earlier in the day for her to care for his invalid mother and two small children.
He said that his wife had posted a card on a bulletin board in a supermarket at 5700 N. Milwaukee Avenue stating she was seeking work as a babysitter. The man who called and asked her to care for his mother and children told her to come to an address that police later found was non-existent.
Mrs Flanagan told the man she had to take a bus to get to the address and the man told her he would meet her at the bus stop, her husband said. Before leaving she left her older daughter Laura, 7, with her father-in-law, Otis, who lives upstairs.
The bus driver told police that the woman and the child were approached by a man of about 30 years old at the bus stop and she and the child walked away with him.
The bus driver identified a police photograph of a known sex offender as the man he saw meet the woman. Police said he failed to identify the man at a showup, and he was released.
The bodies were discovered at about 7:20 a.m. in the lot by Donald Dittmann, 47, a sales representative who lives at 408 N. Main St, across from the church. The two bodies lay in front of the left front wheel of his car which he had parked in the parking lot.
Minutes before Dittmann found the bodies and called police, an anonymous woman caller told the Mount Prospect police that a mother and her daughter could be found in the lot.
A motorist who drove by an hour before the discovery, Kenneth L. Kranz of 413 N. Main St., later told police that he had seen another car in the lot.
Dennis Flanagan, husband of the slain woman, buries his face in his handkerchief as he is escorted away from the county morgue by his father, Otis Flanagan.
Viv
I’ll start at the beginning: the bulletin board. Here, the commonplace prevails: someone wants to sell their bicycle, another offers to mow lawns (the murderer likely took Mrs Flanagan’s note with him). The murderer stood here and caught the scent here, he smelled blood here and the plan formed in his head once he had done the shopping and paid and stood holding his stained net bags. Then I go to the church and walk around the parking lot – I have never been to a crime scene before, and I had expected a police cordon where the bodies had been discovered and maybe the police and curious onlookers snooping around, but there’s nothing. All the same, my heart is racing. He dumped the bodies here, but where did the assault take place? I have my tape recorder in my purse, but there is nobody I can question. Why did he discard the bodies in front of a church, isn’t that even more perverted? Some men have a thing for nurses and nannies, but why the baby too? Whenever there are really young children crawling around on the floor, I get scared of accidentally kicking them, so as a precaution I sit down on the floor and tuck my feet underneath me until that fear passes. Neither Donald Dittmann nor Kenneth Kranz were home, at any rate nobody opened the door even though in the end I got so impatient that I held the bell down, it was at Dittmann’s that my ability to wait expired.
Now I’m standing in front of the house of sorrow. The curtains are drawn on both floors. Otis Flanagan lives on the top floor. Maybe he’s in the right frame of mind to be able to answer a couple of questions. I think the curtain moves and I raise my hand with the bouquet. You have to remember that there is also a seven-year-old child – the father has something to keep living for. Now the three of them form a small circle, father and grandfather will have to spend their lives filling in for the mother, maybe they’ll need a nanny, but it’s a modest neighbourhood, homes with no personnel. No one comes out of the house. I end up just laying the bouquet on the stairs.
I can hardly imagine something worse than being in the papers.
Ellen
The homeless call Miss Maier ‘Kiki’ (she told them that was her name) when we stop so that she can give them some good advice. She loves giving good advice, for example, ‘I just saw an old mattress that was left out as garbage,’ she says, ‘if I were you, I would hurry over before someone else snaps it up. It’s far better than your cardboard.’
Sarah
‘Viv, I don’t think this is working.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘No, I think you’ll have to find another job.’
‘You think so?’
‘Yes, and look how big Ellen has gotten. We don’t really need you any longer.’
‘I seem to remember the other day you talked about how now that Ellen has gotten so big, you were thinking of getting a foster child. Couldn’t you just take me instead?’
‘That’s not exactly what we had in mind.’
‘I suppose not.’
Peter
My Lord I don’t know how she has amassed so much stuff or what any of it is. It looked like there was a flea market in the driveway. Some of her possessions were in cardboard boxes, other things in handbags and plastic bags and plastic containers and even tubs. I was afraid that her new employer, Mr Marsh, who kindly offered to pick her up, was going to drive off in quite the hurry at the sight of it all. He came (sensibly) in a Land Rover, and together we managed to stow it all on the bed of the vehicle and lash it down.
Narrator
One of Vivian’s photographs comes to mind. It shows a small family that has just got off the train and is standing next to all their stuff. The mother is holding a baby in one arm, two small children are standing next to her and the father, and they are surrounded by suitcases and cardboard boxes. And you ask yourself: how are they ever going to get away from there? There are not enough hands for all the luggage.
Sarah
I feel like a terrible human being. But it’s also a relief. And Peter, Ellen and I have been more close-knit of late. I gave her an extra-thick envelope as a farewell gift. Just look at how much she has bought, especially second-hand things! And then there is a lot she has found, I know that because she often came and showed me various items and asked me whether I could come up with a suggestion as to what they could be used for. She has taught Ellen to rummage through garbage cans. She has an entire shelf of trophies in her room; just as long she confines herself to one shelf.
Ellen
I don’t think Mom should have put her arms around Dad and me when we had said goodbye and Miss Maier sat down in the car. It made her look so alone. I’m going to miss her stillness, oh how I’m going to miss her – I felt like running after the car and screaming.
Viv
I wonder if they’re just a tiny bit worried about the old girl who has no-one on the family front whatsoe
ver? Can someone please tell me if I’ve become afraid of living? Hello? Then we’re off.
Peter
The telephone rang. It was the nice man from earlier. The bottom spring in his normally so sturdy Land Rover had snapped from the weight! He took it well. He thought I should know. We shared a bit of a laugh about it. Of course, I offered to pay, in some way or other I feel like she can be considered my responsibility until she reaches his house, and this little nuisance did happen en route. But on no account would he hear of it.
Vivienne
I’m fortunate that I am often placed high up. Now I live above Mr Marsh’s clinic, a short distance from the house. There’s an awful lot of running around throughout the day and noise from downstairs, but what does it matter, I’m only rarely here during the day. On account of the clinic, in the house it is only Sunday when it actually is Sunday, the rest of the neighbourhood seems swaddled in Sunday all week, even though the men go to work, and the children go to school in the morning, and they return home in the afternoon, the stillness pervades the large lawns and, apart from what the gardeners, sanitation workers, plumbers, piano tuners and nannies do, there is a lack of visible activity.
Vivian Page 9
