The phrase “victim of rape” calls up certain stereotyped images: an attractive young woman going home alone late at night, enters a dark street, is grabbed… or, a beautiful young suburban matron, mother of three, wakes after midnight, feels a nameless dread, is grabbed… The truth is apt to be less romantic. Evelyn Mayne was 65, long divorced, neglected and thoroughly detested by her two daughters-in-law and only to a lesser degree by their husbands, lived on various programs of old age, medical and psychiatric assistance, was scrawny, gloomy, alcoholic, waspish, believed life was futile, and either overdosed on sleeping pills or else lightly cut her wrists three or four times a year.
Her assailant at least was somewhat more glamorous, in a sick way. The rapist was dressed all in rather close-fitting gray, hands covered by gray gloves, face obscured by a long shock of straight silver hair falling over it. And in the left hand, at first, a long knife that gleamed silver in the dimness.
And she wasn’t grabbed either, at first, but only commanded in a harsh whisper coming through the hair to lie quietly or be cut up.
When she was alone again at last, she silently waited something like the ten minutes she’d been warned to, thinking that at least she hadn’t been cut up, or else (who knows?) wishing she had been. Then she went next door (in the opposite direction to mine) and roused Marcia Everly, who was a buyer for a department store and about half her age. After the victim had been given a drink, they called the police and Evelyn Mayne’s psychiatrist and also her social worker, who knew her current doctor’s number (which she didn’t), but they couldn’t get hold of either of the last two. Marcia suggested waking me and Evelyn Mayne countered by suggesting they wake Mr. Helpful, who has the next room beyond Marcia’s down the hall. Mr. Helpful (otherwise nicknamed Baldy, I never remembered his real name) was someone I loathed because he was always prissily dancing around being neighborly and asking if there was something he could do—and because he was six foot four tall, while I am rather under average height.
Marcia Everly is also very tall, at least for a woman, but as it happens I do not loathe her in the least. Quite the opposite in fact.
But Evelyn Mayne said I wasn’t sympathetic, while Marcia (thank goodness!) loathed Mr. Helpful as much as I do—she thought him a weirdo, along with half the other tenants in the building.
So they compromised by waking neither of us, and until the police came Evelyn Mayne simply kept telling the story of her rape over and over, rather mechanically, while Marcia listened dutifully and occupied her mind as to which of our crazy fellow-tenants was the best suspect—granting it hadn’t been done by an outsider, although that seemed likeliest. The three most colorful were the statuesque platinum-blonde drag queen on the third floor, the long-haired old weirdo on six who wore a cape and was supposed to be into witchcraft, and the tall, silver-haired, Nazi-looking lesbian on seven (assuming she wore a dildo for the occasion and was nuttier than a five-dollar fruit cake).
Ours really is a weird building, you see, and not just because of its occupants, who sometimes seem as if they were all referred here by mental hospitals. No, it’s eerie in its own right. You see, several decades ago it was a hotel with all the rich, warm inner life that once implied: bevies of maids, who actually used the linen closets (empty now) on each floor and the round snap-capped outlets in the baseboards for a vacuum system (that hadn’t been operated for a generation) and the two dumb-waiters (their doors forever shut and painted over). In the old days there had been bellboys and an elevator operator and two night porters who’d carry up drinks and midnight snacks from a restaurant that never closed.
But they’re gone now, every last one of them, leaving the halls empty-feeling and very gloomy, and the stairwell an echoing void, and the lobby funereal, so that the mostly solitary tenants of today are apt to seem like ghosts, especially when you meet one coming silently around a turn in the corridor where the ceiling light’s burnt out.
Sometimes I think that, what with the smaller and smaller families and more and more people living alone, our whole modern world is getting like that.
The police finally arrived, two grave and solicitous young men making a good impression—especially a tall and stalwart (Marcia told me) Officer Hart. But when they first heard Evelyn Mayne’s story, they were quite skeptical (Marcia could tell, or thought she could, she told me). But they searched Evelyn’s room and poked around the fire escapes and listened to her story again, and then they radioed for a medical policewoman, who arrived with admirable speed and who decided after an examination that in all probability there’d been recent sex, which would be confirmed by analysis of some smears she’d taken from the victim and the sheets.
Officer Hart did two great things, Marcia said. He got hold of Evelyn Mayne’s social worker and told him he’d better get on over quick. And he got from him the phone number of her son who lived in the city and called him up and threw a scare into his wife and him about how they were the nearest of kin, God damn it, and had better start taking care of the abused and neglected lady.
Meanwhile the other cop had been listening to Evelyn Mayne, who was still telling it, and he asked her innocent questions, and had got her to admit that earlier that night she’d gone alone to a bar down the street (a rather rough place) and had one drink, or maybe three. Which made him wonder (Marcia said she could tell) whether Evelyn hadn’t brought the whole thing on herself, maybe by inviting some man home with her, and then inventing the rape, at least in part, when things went wrong. (Though I couldn’t see her inventing the silver hair.)
Anyhow the police got her statement and got it signed and then took off, even more solemnly sympathetic than when they’d arrived, Officer Hart in particular.
Of course, I didn’t know anything about all this when I knocked on Marcia’s door before going to work that morning, to confirm a tentative movie date we’d made for that evening. Though I was surprised when the door opened and Mr. Helpful came out looking down at me very thoughtfully, his bald head gleaming, and saying to Marcia in the voice adults use when children are listening, “I’ll keep in touch with you about the matter. If there is anything I can do, don’t hesitate…”
Marcia, looking at him very solemnly, nodded.
And then my feeling of discomfiture was completed when Evelyn Mayne, empty glass in hand and bathrobe clutched around her, edged past me as if I were contagious, giving me a peculiarly hostile look and calling back to Marcia over my head, “I’ll come back, my dear, when I’ve repaired my appearance, so that people can’t say you’re entertaining bedraggled old hags.”
I was relieved when Marcia gave me a grin as soon as the door was closed and said, “Actually she’s gone to get herself another drink, after finishing off my supply. But really, Jeff, she has a reason to this morning—and for hating any man she runs into.” And her face grew grave and troubled (and a little frightened too) as she quickly clued me in on the night’s nasty events. Mr. Helpful, she explained, had dropped by to remind them about a tenants’ meeting that evening and, when he got the grisly news, to go into a song and dance about how shocked he was and how guilty at having slept through it all, and what could he do?
Once she broke off to ask, almost worriedly, “What I can’t understand, Jeff, is why any man would want to rape someone like Evelyn.”