The Porter's Muse
Page 4
Chapter 5
“Mad Bomber” Captured; Mental Test Planned
Dateline—January 21, 1957: Suspected ‘mad bomber’ was captured during a peaceful Connecticut Raid, last night. The 51-year-old disgruntled ex-Con Edison employee, under heavy guard, claimed to be happy about his 16-year bombing campaign. Authorities say the man confessed to planting more than thirty bombs in the City but never intended to kill. Fifteen were injured between 1940 and the night of his capture. Mental tests will be performed at Bellevue Hospital, where the man is being held under a judge’s orders.
Just one year we had been our own family. Flown from the nest, it seemed we’d soar. Mother was again confident; Father not so much. He’d lived every breath at his mother’s behest. For all my parents’ days together before we left my grandmother’s house, Amelia McNair Lamberton told Daddy when to work and for whom. How much money to save, how much to give her, what he’d spend on us, and what he would not. She was dietitian, superintendent of housekeeping, and master of Daddy’s heart. Such governance came without boundaries. Mother tried to resist, but she couldn’t shelter from the force of Amelia’s foot soldier, Daddy, whose only charge under his mother’s reign was to contain my mother’s spirit and put down her will.
Daddy didn’t seem like the kind of man who’d endure being pushed around by a woman. Seduced, yes. It was a curious hold Amelia McNair Lamberton had on him, as if some confidence between them leveled his resistance.
One Christmas and after the gift-giving, I motioned Daddy with my eyes toward his things so he’d remember the present he’d hidden away and had forgotten to give Mother. I’d found it tucked in his workbox tucked in the foot of one of his argyles, a gold and turquoise one Mother had given him as a birthday gift. It was a lovely pearl collar stitched in layers that extended upwards to mid-neckline and was fashioned into a “V” where it cascaded downward, just the sort of thing Mother would adore.
“Daddy, you’ve forgotten something,” I was forced to say.
“Not now, honey,” he was curt.
Surely, the pearls were Daddy’s big surprise. Why else would he have given Mother, first, that hideous orange frock and cheap matching slippers?
“Daddy, you forgot,” I persisted. That’s when Amelia McNair Lamberton stepped in.
“I’ll not have any disruption, young lady,” she was firm. “Hush your meddling, and go set out the silver. We’ll be having dinner, shortly.”
Delia Lamberton loved that necklace. I’m sure she wore it to Daddy’s funeral. I regret that I missed it. I could have had a chuckle with the others. Not about Mother and Delia’s necklace. The morbid relief would have been the scene of Daddy’s fully-open casket and his pant legs cuffed unfashionably high, just to show off the dead man’s pride—argyle socks. The details, I’d heard over and over, were generously reported by every woman who’d known them intimately (The socks; Daddy would’ve never bothered to know them.) I wonder if he had his wallet on him, too, and if Mother’s photograph was still pressed inside.
I’d come in from another weekend vacation with Mother’s younger sister in Stamford the day Daddy… I knew he’d be disappointed and dreaded him telling me so. But he had to know. Who else would tell mother. Nothing completed that year. Nothing ended as it should have. Nothing was either as it should have been or as it could have been. Like hot chocolate in winter when you’ve travelled out of the warmth and into the cold to get it. What is the point?
There was no Christmas that year. With Daddy’s pension gone to Delia and Amelia McNair Lamberton, a meager allowance from the payment was all that came our way. Well, the money didn’t exactly go to Amelia McNair Lamberton. But you know my father. And that’ll leave no guessing about his mother’s authority over her daughter-in-law number two, whom she’d counseled in every way she’d done her son to give us little and control us a lot. Mother frightened Delia, which worked out pretty well for us. The payment came by post every month without fail, and not a single condition was placed on how it was to be spent and no accounting was requested. Good thing because any demands placed upon that miserly sum might well had spun Mother loose from her pent up rage.
Things were real tight by summer, which is why I took a job at Bellevue Hospital, after a short nursing assistant course at Helene Fuld. I was still dreaming about college. Still dreaming about him. Wondering about …; anyway, money was tight. And everything else had changed.
Chapter 6
It was in the paper January 22, 1957. “Peyton Place Author and Husband Separate.” Front page; below the fold; right-hand column. I was stunned.
You might find my recalling the exact date Grace Metaliuos and her husband split peculiar. I’ve never gotten over the fact that I read it in a Connecticut newspaper I’d picked up on a Bronx-bound 4 train heading to work.
Umm. Give me a minute.
“Mad Bomber” Just an Average Looking Middle-aged Guy
Dateline—January 22, 1957: Self-professed ‘mad bomber’ Refused Lawyer, vowing to face charges on his own, saying, “No. I might as well face it and get it off my chest.”
Humm. He was in the paper, too, that January 22, 1957. Stout man—white—not particularly handsome. Front page; above the fold; right-hand column. I hadn’t noticed.
Had I gone to pre-med, I might’ve been interning in Dr. Dickinson Richards’ lab. That way Nurse Rita couldn’t have called on me to assist the gentleman inmate in room seventeen. Under heavy guard and shackled, the stout—white—not particularly handsome man was absolutely helpless, again.
Rag washing...He asked if I would dip his washcloth in the hot water from the faucet once more and lay it flat against his face. I was thinking I could smother him; maybe press my thumb against his throat and quiet his gasps by clinching his nose beneath the facecloth. I could open his sedation IV to administer a lethal dose.
An arm and five minutes I’d given him. And he hadn’t even remembered my face.
Russell McNair Lamberton was my father. And on January 22, 1957, I wiped the ass of the man who murdered him and soothed his face with a fresh, hot facecloth.
What madman would beg the arm of his victim’s daughter? I had to know. So he lived.
I listened, while on my shift the next days, for the results of the psychiatric probing the man underwent. Of course Nurse Rita saved his daily washes for me because “You calm him,” she said. “That helps with the evaluation.” What of the man’s condition she didn’t share. Nurse Glenda, on the other hand, could be relied upon for daily but mostly forgettable updates.
“He seems to like men,” she reported on the first day of the psychiatrist’s session with him. “He’s henpecked, you know. Lives with his sisters,” she kept blabbering.
Useless.
Aides don’t ask questions of their superiors, unless they’re screwing around with them on the side. Nancy Stern just so happened to be doing the dirty with Dr. Strauss, who shared a practice with Mr. Mad Bomber’s quack.
Now, this chick was worth staying within earshot.
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Nancy sort of confided in Nurse Rita. I say sort of because I’m standing right there in between them and she’s damn near whispering into my ear. “He’s claiming to be a victim, saying he was gypped...wants an apology. Poor guy,” she went on.
Nurse Rita didn’t catch the irony and says, “I feel so bad for him. He complimented my hair, yesterday, you know. Imagine that. Strapped down to his bed like that, and he still noticed my hair. What a lovely little man.”
He is lovely, I thought.
That day I first saw him, he’d charmed me with his gentle manner, which is why I hadn’t hesitated to help him meet his train. I’ve thought of him often since. He’d saved my life if even by coincidence. So many days I imagined bumping into him that I rehearsed the moment—I’d give him a hug, offer to buy him a cup of hot chocolate—nowhere close to Grand Central, of course—I’d tell him all about Daddy, except for the scoundrel part. He’d be im
pressed. I figured he’d be so charmed by my story that he’d offer to meet me, again. We’d grow close. I’d confide in him. He’d saved my life. Wouldn’t that make us close?
Mr. Mad Bomber spent the next several days convincing Nancy’s psychiatrist-lover’s partner that he was glad about what he’d done and how he would have stopped if those “selfish money hounds at the plant” had just paid him what he was owed. No amount of coaxing could get him to understand the cruelty of his bombing tirade. There wasn’t much point in forcing the issue. “After all, it’s not like anybody was seriously hurt. A few years in a straitjacket will cure him,” Nancy ventriloquized her lover’s report.
He’d been at Bellevue four days, and I had given him three baths before he asked my name.
“Amelia McNeil Lamberton,” I lied.
“It suits you,” he said.
“Thank you,” I was gracious. “It’s my grandmother’s name.”
“Then, she must be a lovely as you,” he carried on until I excused myself.
You know damn well Amelia McNeil Lamberton would never have given me her name, nor would she have allowed my father. But it was the thing I most hated hearing. I figured if he’d call me that, I’d drum up enough rage to do him in. But he couldn’t remember the name.
What the hell!—the man murdered my father; I helped him escape, and now I’m washing his ass every day, and he thinks I’m lovely. But he doesn’t remember my fucking face!—or the name I jacked so I could get pissed off enough to slit his throat.
I brought him a homemade meatloaf sandwich on the fifth day. The guards said I could. He was out of his restraints, then, and had been given a small table to hold a short pile of books his sisters had brought down from Connecticut. We borrowed the chairs that the guards would have been sitting on had they been doing their job. But that stout—white—not particularly handsome man had one helluva personality, if you could stomach the touch of real crazy. No one bothered watching him.
Some guy is blasting Azuquita Pa’l Cafe on his Walkman three rows behind me. You’d think the conductor might tell him to turn it down. Look at ‘em. He’s too busy shaking his rump. I wonder what that old woman down on Lexington thinks of this song if she isn’t dead, already. All those times she came rushing down those stairs of hers, just to bring Daddy a hot cup of coffee, black no sugar, and a glass of sweet tea for me... Holy shit!—He was screwing her, too—I figured, back then.