Tess was late. When she came in, the room hushed. She sat down at the head of the table and tried to start class. She was clearly upset.
"Did you hear about Maria?" one of the students asked.
Tess hung her head. "Yes," she said. "It's horrible."
"Is she okay?"
"I just spoke to her," she said. "I'm going to see her at the hospital. It's always so difficult. This poetry business."
We didn't quite understand. What did Maria's accident have to do with poetry?
"It was in the paper," a student volunteered.
Tess looked at him sharply. "They used her name?"
"What is it, Tess?" someone asked.
Our question was answered the following day, when an almost identical article described it as an attempted suicide. The only other difference was that this time the paper left out her name. It didn't take a genius to put two and two together.
Tess had told me it would mean quite a bit to Maria if I went to visit her in the hospital. "That was a powerful poem you wrote," she added, but didn't say what else she knew.
I went. But before I did, Maria made another unsuccessful attempt. She tried to kill herself by cutting an electrical cord near her bed, unfurling the wires inside, and scoring them over and over against her wrists. She'd done this while partially paralyzed on her left side. But a nurse had walked in on her, and now her arms were strapped to the bed.
She was in Grouse Irving Memorial Hospital. A nurse led me into the room. Standing beside Maria's bed were her father and her brothers. I waved to Maria and then shook the men's hands. I said my name and that I was in her poetry class. None of them was very responsive. I attributed this to shock, and to what might have seemed the strange phenomenon of this woman visiting who appeared to have some connection with her that they, her father and brothers, didn't. They left the room.
"Thank you for coming," she said in a whisper. She wanted to hold my hand.
The two of us didn't really know each other, had just shared Tess's class, and, until recently, I had harbored a bit of resentment toward the fact that she'd walked out on my workshop.
"Can you sit?" she asked.
"Yes."
I did.
"It was your poem," she said now. "It brought it all back."
I sat there as she whispered to me her own facts. The man and the boys who had just left the room had raped her for a period of years when she was growing up.
"At a certain point it stopped," she said. "My brothers grew old enough to know what they were doing was wrong."
"Oh, Maria," I said, "I never meant to-"
"Stop. It's good. I need to face it."
"Have you told your mother?"
"She said she didn't want to hear it. She promised she would not tell my father as long as I never mentioned it again. She's not speaking to me."
I looked at all the get-well cards above her bed. She was a resident advisor and all the residents on the hall, as well as her friends, had sent cards. I was struck with what was painfully clear. By jumping but surviving, she was now completely dependent on her family to take care of her. On her father. "Have you told Tess?"
Her face lit up. "Tess has been wonderful."
"I know."
"Your poem said all the things I've been feeling inside for years. All the things I'm so afraid of feeling."
"Is that good?" I asked.
"We'll see," she said and smiled weakly.
Maria would recover from the fall and return to school. For a time she severed relations with her family.
But that day, we joked that she sure had commented on my poem by jumping, and that Tess would have to give her that. Then I talked. I talked because she wanted me to and because here, next to her, I could. I told her about the grand jury and the lineup and about Gail.
"You're so lucky," she said. "I'll never get to do any of that. I want you to go all the way."
We were still holding hands. Every moment in that room was precious to both of us.
I looked up eventually and noticed her father standing in the door. Maria couldn't see him. But she saw my eyes.
He did not leave or advance. He was waiting for me to get up and go. I felt this radiate from where he stood. He didn't know exactly what was going on between us, but there was something he seemed not to trust.
By November 16, the "known pubic hair sample from Gregory Madison" and the "Negroid pubic hair recovered from pubic combings of Alice Sebold, May 1981" had been compared. The lab found that on seventeen points of microscopic comparison, the hairs had matched on all seventeen.
On November 18, Gail drafted an inter-office letter for the files. She posted it on the twenty-third.
There is no question this was a rape. Victim was a virgin and hymen was torn in two places. Lab reports show semen, and medicals show contusions and lacerations.
Identification is at issue. Rape was May 8, 1981 and victim gave detailed description to cops but no arrest made. She goes back to Pennsylvania May 9, 1981. When she returns to S.U. in the fall, she spots defendant on street, and he approaches her and says, "Hey, girl, don't I know you from somewhere?" She runs and calls cops. I had a line-up and she ID's wrong guy (who was a dead ringer for defendant and standing right next to him, and who defendant personally requested). Later she tells cops that she thought it could have been either the defendant or the other guy. Defendant's pubic hair was found to be consistent with one found in her pubic combings. There was a partial print on the weapon (knife) found at the scene, but it has insufficient ridge details to make a comparison (I had it sent to FBI for more testing). Lab advises they cannot determine blood type from semen because it is too tainted with her blood. Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.
I returned home to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. One day after coming back to Syracuse on Greyhound, there was a letter waiting for me at my dorm.
"Pursuant to your request," it read in part, "this is to advise you that the above-mentioned captioned defendant has been indicted by the grand jury."
I was thrilled. I stood in my single at Haven and shook with it. I called my mother and told her. I was moving forward. The trial seemed imminent. Any day now.
I was in class when Madison entered his plea on December 4, before Justice Walter T. Gorman. On an eight-count-indictment, Madison pled not guilty. A pretrial hearing was scheduled for December 9. Paquette, representing Madison, admitted to one petit larceny conviction "back somewhere." The State didn't know enough to counter him, and Madison's juvenile record could not be considered. When Gorman asked Assistant DA Plochocki, who was representing the State because Gail was in another court, if he wanted to be heard on bail, Plochocki said, "Judge, I don't have the file." So bail was set at $5,000. Mistakenly, through Christmas and New Year's, I joyfully pictured my assailant in jail.
Before I went home for the Christmas holidays, I'd taken an incomplete in Italian 101, a C- in Classics, a B in Tess's survey course-my paper wasn't quite up to snuff-and two A's: one in Wolff's workshop, one in Gallagher's.
I saw Steve Carbonaro. He had given up Don Quixote and taken to keeping a bottle of Chivas Regal in his apartment near Penn. He scoured flea markets for old, threadbare Oriental rugs, wore a satin smoking jacket, smoked a pipe, and wrote sonnets for a new girlfriend whose name he loved-Juliet. Through his window, with the lights turned off in his own apartment, he watched two extroverted lovers who lived in an apartment across the way. I didn't like the taste of scotch and thought the pipe was stupid.
My sister was still a virgin at twenty-two. I spent time wishing she were less pristine. I know she spent time wishing she were less pristine too. But our motivations were different. I wanted her to fall-for that was how it was seen in our household-so I wouldn't be alone. She wanted to fall so that she would have more in common with most of her friends.