by Alice Sebold
“Nothing unusual, no.”
I wanted it to be over now.
“You said that you looked at your watch when you went in the park?”
“Yes.”
“What time was it?”
“Twelve o’clock.”
“You looked at your watch when you got to your dorm?”
“I didn’t look at my watch. I—was very aware of what time it was because I was surrounded by police, and I may have also looked at my watch, and I knew that it was two-fifteen when I got back to the dorm.”
“When you got back to the dorm? Were the police called when you got back to your dorm?”
“Yes.”
“When you got back to the dorm, at two-fifteen, and there had been no police called yet?”
“Right.”
“They came sometime after that?”
“Yes. Immediately after I got back to my dorm.”
He had finally worn me down. It made awful sense that no matter how hard I tried, he would be left standing at the end.
“Now, you said, you testified that he kissed you; is that right?”
“Yes.”
Once or twice or a lot of times?”
I could see Paquette. Madison sat behind him, interested. I felt the two of them were coming in after me.
“Once or twice when we were standing and then, after he had laid me down on the ground, a few times. He kissed me.” The tears were just rolling down my cheeks now and my lips trembling. I didn’t bother to wipe them. I had sweat through the Kleenex that I held.
Paquette knew he had broken me. That was enough. He didn’t want this.
“May I have a moment, Your Honor?”
“Yes,” Gorman said.
Paquette went to the defense table and conferred with Madison, then checked his yellow legal pad and files.
He looked up. “Nothing further,” he said.
The relief in my body was immediate. But then Mastine stood.
“A couple of questions, if it please the court.”
I was tired but knew now that Mastine would handle me gently if he could. His tone was firm but I trusted him.
Mastine was concerned with working Paquette’s former territory, going back to strengthen weak lines. He made a quick five points. First he established how late it was and how tired I was when I gave my statement on the night of the rape. He had me detail all the things I had been through and on no sleep. Then he moved on to my statement on October 5, the one Paquette had gleefully put forth to me—the feeling versus sure. Mastine was able to establish that, as I had said, it was an affidavit in which I retold the encounter with Madison chronologically. I first saw him from the back and had a feeling. I then saw him face-on and was sure.
Then he asked me if anyone was with me. He wanted to point out that because my father was present, I had elected to decline the presence of a rape crisis representative.
“My father is waiting outside,” I said. This fact didn’t seem real to me. Far away, in the hall outside, he was reading. Latin. I hadn’t thought of him since entering the courtroom. I couldn’t.
Mastine asked me how long I had been under Madison in the tunnel and how far away from his face I was.
“One centimeter,” I said.
Then he asked me a question I felt uncomfortable with, one I had known he might ask if Paquette’s approach warranted it.
“Could you give the judge an idea of how many young black men you would see on a daily average in your travels, or class or dormitory or at all?”
Paquette objected. I knew why. It went straight to his case.
“Overruled,” said Gorman.
I said, “A lot,” and Mastine had me quantify. “More than fifty or less?” I said that it was more. The whole thing made me uncomfortable, separating the students I knew by their race, pooling them into columns, and tabulating their number. But this wouldn’t be the first time, or the last, that I wished my rapist had been white.
Mastine had no further questions.
Paquette got up only to have me repeat one thing. He wanted me to repeat the distance of Madison’s face from mine during the rape itself. I did: one centimeter. Later he would try and use my certainty against me. Quoting this distance in his final statement as to why I couldn’t be trusted as a credible witness.
“No redirect,” Mastine said.
“You are excused,” Judge Gorman said, and I stood.
My legs were shaky underneath me and I had sweat through my skirt and stockings and slip. The male bailiff who had led me in came toward the center of the room and waited for me.
He took me out.
Down the hall, Murphy spotted me and helped my father gather his books. The bailiff looked at me.
“I’ve been in this business for thirty years,” he said. “You are the best rape witness I’ve ever seen on the stand.”
I would hold on to that moment for years.
The bailiff walked back toward court.
Murphy hustled me off “We want to get away from the door,” he said. “They’ll be breaking for lunch.”
“Are you okay?” my dad asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. I did not recognize him as my father. He was just a person standing there, like all the rest. I was shaking and needed to sit down. The three of us, Murphy, my father, and I, returned to their bench.
They spoke to me. I don’t remember what they said. It was over.
Gail breezed out of the courtroom and over to us. She looked at my father. “Your daughter’s an excellent witness, Bud,” she said.
“Thank you,” my father said.
“Was I okay, Gail?” I asked. “I was worried. He was really mean.”
“That’s his job,” she said. “But you held up under him. I was watching the judge.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“The judge? He looked exhausted,” she said, smiling. “Billy is really tired. I wanted to get up there so bad. We have a break until two and then it’s the doctor. Another pregnant lady!”
It was like a relay race, I realized. The leg I’d run had been arduous and long, but there were still others—more questions and answers—more key witnesses, many more hours to Gail’s day.
“If I learn anything I’ll contact the detective,” she said, turning to me. She extended her hand to my father. “Nice to meet you, Bud. You can be proud.”
“I hope the next time we meet it’s under more pleasant circumstances,” he said. It had just hit him. We were leaving.
Gail hugged me. I had never hugged a pregnant woman before, found it awkward, almost genteel, the way both she and I had to lean only the upper halves of our bodies in. “You’re incredible, kiddo,” she said quietly to me.
Murphy drove us back to Hotel Syracuse, where we packed. I may have slept. My father called my mother. I don’t remember those hours. My attention had been so focused that now I let go. I was aware that my case was still continuing as we folded clothes and waited for Murphy to pick us up later that afternoon. My father and I sat on the edges of the twin beds. Putting distance between us and the city of Syracuse was our unspoken goal. We knew the plane would do it. We waited.
Murphy came early to meet us. He brought news.
“Gail wanted to be the one to tell you,” he said, “but she couldn’t get away.”
My father and I were in the carpeted lobby, our red American Tourister luggage waiting nearby.
“They got him,” he said joyfully. “Guilty on six counts. He was remanded to jail!”
I went blank. My legs felt weak beneath me.
“Thank God,” my father said. He said this quietly, acknowledging an answered prayer.
We were in the car. Murphy was chattering. He was high off it. I sat in the back of the car while my father and Murphy sat in the front. My hands were cold and limp. I remember feeling them distinctly resting on either side of me, useless.
At the airport, while my father and Murphy sat off at a distance in an airpor
t lounge, I called my mother from a pay phone. Murphy offered to buy my father a drink.
I pushed in my home phone number and waited.
“Hello,” my mother said.
“Mom, it’s Alice. I have news.”
I faced the wall and cupped the mouthpiece in both hands. “We did it, Mom,” I said. “All six counts except the weapons one. He was remanded to jail.”
I didn’t know what remanded meant yet but I used the word.
My mother was ecstatic. She shouted up and down the house in Paoli, “She did it! She did it! She did it!” over and over again. She could not contain her joy.
I had done it.
Murphy and my father exited the bar. Our flight was boarding soon. I found out what remanded meant. It meant Madison would not be released between conviction and sentencing. They had handcuffed him inside the courtroom as the charges were read. This made Murphy gleeful.
“I wish I could have been there to see his face.”
It had been a long, good day for John Murphy, and, as my father confided on the airplane, Murphy could really pack the drinks away. But who could blame him? He was heady, celebratory, off to see his Alice.
I was drained. Though it took me a while to realize it, I, too, had been remanded. I would be held over for a long time.
On June 2, I received a letter from the probation department of the County of Onondaga. They wrote to inform me that they were conducting “a pre-sentence investigation of a young man who was recently found guilty after trial of Rape First Degree, Sodomy First Degree and other related charges. These charges,” the letter stated, “stem from an incident in which you were the victim.” They wrote to inquire if I had any input on the sentencing recommendation.
I wrote back. I recommended the maximum sentence allowable under the law, and quoted Madison calling me “the worst bitch.” I knew Syracuse had been voted the seventh-best city to live in that year, and I pointedly stated that having men like Madison on the streets wouldn’t bolster this reputation. I knew my best hope to be heard was by making the point that a maximum sentence would make the men who sentenced him look good. That way they wouldn’t be doing it for me, but for the people who elected them and paid their salaries. I knew this. Whatever skills I had, I used.
I closed my letter by signing it over my title: victim.
On July 13,1982, in a court where Gorman presided, and Mastine, Paquette, and Madison were in attendance, Gregory Madison was sentenced. It was the maximum for rape and sodomy: eight and a third to twenty-five years. The larger sentences, along with lesser ones given for the four remaining charges, would run concurrently.
Mastine called to tell me. He also informed me that Gail had given birth. My mother and I went shopping for a gift. When I saw Gail fifteen years later, she brought the gift along to show me she remembered.
TWELVE
That summer I began my makeover. I had been raped but I had also been raised on Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue. The possibilities of the before-and-after that I had been presented with all my life took hold. Besides, those around me—namely my mother now, with my sister working in Washington before leaving for Syria, and my father off in Spain—encouraged me to move on with my life. “You don’t want to become defined by the rape,” she said, and I agreed.
I got a job in an ill-fated T-shirt shop where I was the only employee. I stamped badges in an unventilated attic and did sloppy silk-screening for local softball teams. My boss, who was twenty-three, was out hustling up business around town. Sometimes he was drunk and showed up with his buddies to watch TV I was wearing huge clothes at the time, ones I made myself, what even my mother called tent dresses. And I wore a lot of them in the June and July heat of 1982. One day when my boss and his friends taunted me to show a little flesh, I turned around and walked out. I drove home in my father’s car, covered in inks.
It was just me and my mother again, like the summer when I turned fifteen. I kept looking for another job—my journal is full of shoe-store interviews and office-supply-store applications—but like in any suburb during the summer, jobs were scarce once mid-summer hit. Mom was trying to lose weight. I decided to join her. We watched Richard Simmons and bought an exercise bike. I have a memory of the Scarsdale diet, small, measured steak and chicken bits that we could barely get down. “This diet is costing a fortune,” my mother said as we ate more meat that summer than I have since.
But I began to take off pounds. I would sit in front of the television in the morning and watch obese women cry with Simmons, setting off a sort of round-robin of tears among the guest, Simmons, and the studio audience. Sometimes I cried too. Not because I thought I was as fat as the women on the screen but because I thought I knew exactly how ugly they felt. I might have been able to get down the street without being called names and I could see my shoelaces over my belt, but I identified with Simmons’s guests as I did with no one else. They were the walking, talking ostracized who had done nothing wrong.
So I cried. And I got on that bike. And I hated my body. I used that hate to shed fifteen pounds.
In late summer, after my father had returned from Spain, the three of us were out in the yard doing yard work. I was supposed to ride the ride-on mower. A typical Sebold fight erupted. I didn’t want to, etc. Why did Mary get to go live in D.C. and then go to Syria? My father called me ungrateful. It escalated. Suddenly, just as it was traveling down the familiar path to all-out shouting, I burst into tears. I started crying but couldn’t stop. I ran inside up to my room. Trying to sop up the tears was futile. I cried until I was spent, dehydrated, my eyes and the flesh around them a site map of broken capillaries.
Later, I didn’t want to talk about it; I was putting the rape and the trial behind me.
Lila and I wrote back and forth to each other all summer. She was dieting too. Our letters to one another read like journal entries, long, pondering pieces written to have company during the writing as much as to really share any information bulletins about ourselves. We were hot and bored, nineteen and stuck at home with our parents. We told each other our life stories in those rambling letters. How we felt about everything from our individual family members to boys we knew at school. I don’t remember writing her about the trial in detail. If I did, her letters don’t reflect it. I got one postcard in the early summer congratulating me. That’s it. It disappeared from our landscape after that.
As it did from almost everyone’s. The trial seemed to have provided a very solid and heavy back door to the whole thing. Anyone who had actually entered that house with me, looked or walked into the rooms there, was very happy to finally leave the place. The door was shut. I remember agreeing with my mother that I had gone through a death-and-rebirth phenomenon in the span of one year. Rape to trial. Now the land was new and I could make of it anything I wished.
Lila, Sue, and I planned, via our letters, for the coming year. Lila was bringing a kitten down from a litter at home. I had made a pact with my mother: If I jumped up and down enough on a couch that she hated, we might convince my father when he returned from Spain that I should take it to school. I rented a truck with Sue, who lived nearby. My mother was cheery and sent me off with new clothes that fit my new figure. This was going to be the turnaround year. I was going to do what I called “live normal” now.
That fall, Mary Alice was in London in an exchange program. So were other friends. Tess was on leave. I missed them only vaguely. Lila was my living, breathing soul mate. We went everywhere together and cooked up crazy schemes. We both wanted boyfriends. I played the role of the experienced one to Lila’s innocent. Over the summer I had made us matching skirts. We wore these and anything black whenever we went out.
Ken Childs was at a loss without Casey, who was also in London, and we began to pal around. I thought he was cute and, the most important fact, he already knew about me. The three of us went dancing together at on-campus clubs and art-student parties. I wanted to be a lawyer now. People liked hearing this ambition so I said
it a lot. Because of Tess, I wanted to go to Ireland; I told people that too. I went to poetry and fiction readings and indulged in the wine and cheese. I took an independent study in poetry with Hayden Carruth and an independent with Raymond Carver, whom I’ve always thought Tess had assigned to baby-sit me.
One day I ran into Maria Flores on the street. I had written her a triumphant letter early in the summer about the trial. I told her that I had felt her there with me in the courtroom and that I hoped she could take some solace in this. Her letter back was, to be honest, too real for me. “I have a brace on my leg. My ankle is healed and I walk with a cane due to nerve damage. My suicidal tendencies have lessened though frankly, they aren’t all gone.” She worried about her cane inhibiting her from meeting new people and felt ashamed that she had not completed her job as a resident advisor. She ended the letter with a quote from Kahlil Gibran:
“We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without.”
I couldn’t see it for years but if one of us had a window, it was Maria who was looking out.
“I got off scot-free,” I remember saying to Lila. “She’ll wear the rape eternally.”
I was dancing and falling in love. This time, a boy in Lila’s math class: Steve Sherman. I told him about the rape after we had gone to see a movie and had a few drinks. I remember that he was wonderful with it, that he was shocked and horrified but comforting. He knew what to say. Told me I was beautiful, walked me home and kissed me on the cheek. I think he also liked taking care of me. By that Christmas, he became a fixture at our house.
At home my mother was on an upswing too. She was trying new drugs, Elavil and Xanax, and even biorhythm therapies, things she had never considered before. Group therapy was on the horizon. My mother trusting someone other than herself. “You inspire me, kiddo!” she wrote. “If you can go through what you did and go back out, I figure this old gal can too.”
I had reached some positive ground zero; the world was new and open to me.
