"Held for action of the grand jury," the judge said finally. He was tired. I concluded from the movements of Ryan and Meggesto-they were closing up their briefcases-that I was done.
Tess and I went to lunch. We had Upstate New York food-cheese fries, that sort of thing. We sat in a restaurant booth and the smell of the grease from the kitchen filled the air. She talked. She filled the time with talk. I stared up at the lush restaurant philodendrons that adorned and softened the high shelves separating each booth. I was exhausted. Now I wonder if Tess was silently asking the question I do when I reread the transcripts from that day. Where were my parents?
I want to give them an excuse. Perhaps they don't need one. At the time I felt that since it had been my decision to return to Syracuse, the outcome of this-that I had indeed run into my rapist again-was left to me. Now I'm tempted to make all the excuses available to them. My mother didn't fly. My father was teaching. Et cetera. But there was time. My mother could have driven up. My father could have canceled his classes for one day. But I was nineteen and ornery. I was afraid of their comfort, that to feel anything was to feel weak.
I called from the restaurant and told my mother the judge's decision. She was happy I had Tess with me, asked questions about when the grand jury would be held, and fretted about the lineup-any close proximity to him. She had been nervous all day, waiting for the phone to ring. I was glad to bring her good news-it was the closest I could get to straight A's.
I was taking a normal course load in school. Of the five classes two were writing workshops but three were requirements. Tess's survey course. A foreign language. Classics in translation.
In the Classics class I was bored stiff. The teacher spoke less than he intoned and this, combined with the shabby, much-used textbook, made the class seem like an hour of death every other day. But in the midst of this teacher's droning on, I started to read. Catullus. Sappho. Apollonius. And Lysistrata, a play by Aristophanes in which the women of Athens and Sparta rebel-until the men of both nation-states agree to make peace, these women of warring cities unite in a boycott of all marital relations. Aristophanes wrote this in 411 B.C. but it translated beautifully. Our teacher insisted that it was low comedy but in its hidden message-the power of women united-the play was very important to me.
Ten days after the preliminary hearing, I returned home to my dorm after the Italian 101 class I appeared to be failing. I could not speak the words out loud the way we were required to. I sat in the back of the classroom and couldn't keep my mind on the conjugations. When I was called on, I butchered some form of what I was convinced might be a word but which the professor had trouble recognizing. Under my door at Haven, someone had slid an envelope. It was from the office of the district attorney. I was being subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury on November 4 at 2:00 P.M. I was supposed to go down to Marshall Street with Lila after she got back from class. While I waited, I called the DA's office. Gail Uebelhoer, who would represent me, wasn't in. I had the office assistant say her name a few times slowly. I wanted to get it right. I still have the piece of paper where I wrote down, phonetically, how to say it. "You-bel-air or E-belle-air." I practiced saying it in front of the mirror, trying to make it sound natural. "Hello, Ms. You-bel-air, it's Alice Sebold from State versus Gregory Madison." "Hello, Ms. E-belle-air… " I worked on it. I put Italian aside.
NINE
On the morning of November 4, a county car met me at Haven Hall. I watched for it through the glass walls of the dorm's entranceway. Students had already attended breakfast in the cafeteria upstairs and gathered their books to leave for classes.
I had been up since five. I tried to linger over the rituals of hygiene. I took a long shower in the bathroom down the hall. I moisturized my face as Mary Alice had taught me to do the year before. I selected and pressed my clothes. My body alternated between stony chills and hot flashes of nerves centered near my chest. I was aware that this might be the kind of panic that ruled my mother. I swore I would not allow it to rule me.
I left the glass-walled foyer and met the detective as he was coming in. I engaged his eyes. I shook his hand.
"I'm Alice Sebold," I said.
"Right on time."
"It's hard to oversleep on a day like this," I said. I was sunny, cheery, reliable. I wore an oxford-cloth shirt and a skirt. On my feet I wore my Pappagallo pumps. I had fretted that morning because I could not find nude hose. I had black and I had red, neither of which was an appropriate choice for the virgin coed the grand jury would expect. I borrowed a pair from my resident advisor.
In the county car, marked with the seal of Onondaga on the front doors, I rode in the front beside the detective. We made small talk about the university. He talked sports teams, which I knew nothing about, and projected that the Carrier Dome, little over a year old, would bring a lot of revenue to the area. I nodded my head and tried to contribute but I was obsessively worried about the way I looked. The way I spoke. The way I moved.
Tricia, from the Rape Crisis Center, would be my company that day. We had about an hour of waiting before the lineup to be held at the Public Safety Building jail. This time the elevator of the Public Safety Building did not stop at the floor I was familiar with, where the reassuring sight of a security door and policemen with coffee mugs met you once you stepped off. The hallways the detective, Tricia, and I walked down were full of people. Police and victims, lawyers and criminals. A policeman led a man in handcuffs down the hall past us, while he barked an amiable joke about some recent party to another policeman on the hall. There was a Latina, sitting in a plastic chair in the hallway. She stared at the floor, clutching her purse and a crumpled Kleenex in her hand.
The detective brought us into a large room in which makeshift dividers no more than four feet tall separated desks from one another. There were men-policemen-sitting at most of them. Their postures were tense and temporary; they came there to fill out reports or quickly interview a witness, or make a call before going back out on patrol or, perhaps, finally going home.
We were told to sit and wait. That they were experiencing a difficulty with the lineup. His lawyer, it was intimated, was the problem. I had yet to meet Assistant District Attorney Uebelhoer. I wanted to meet her. She was a woman, and in this all-male atmosphere, this made a difference to me. But Uebelhoer was busy with whatever was holding up the lineup.
I was worried about Madison seeing me.
"He won't be able to see you," the detective said. "We lead him in and he's behind a one-way mirror. He can't see a thing."
Tricia and I sat there. She didn't talk like Tess had talked, but she was attentive. She asked after my family and classes, told me lineups were "one of the most stressful procedures for rape victims," and inquired several times whether I wanted anything to drink.
I now think what distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive. Tricia prepared me for failure by saying that it would be okay if I failed. She did this by showing me that the odds out there were against me. But what she told me, I didn't want to hear. In the face of dismal statistics regarding arrest, prosecution, and even full recovery for the victim, I saw no choice but to ignore the statistics. I needed what gave me hope, like being assigned a female assistant district attorney, not the news that the number of rape prosecutions in Syracuse for that calendar year had been nil.