At the ceremony, my father would march in his Princeton colors. Mary and he stood with us in the crowded lobby of the auditorium, where mothers and fathers fussed over the last-minute set of mortarboards, and one woman, unhappy with her daughter's mascara, spit-washed the black flecks from under her eyes. Extended families surrounded the happy graduates, flashbulbs popped, and self-conscious girls and boys tried to make mortarboards look less than nerdy by tilting them on their heads.
My grandmother, mother, and I found our seats on the main floor, to the side of the large body of graduating students. I stood on my chair to find Mary. I spotted her smiling beside another girl, a friend of hers I didn't know.
After the ceremony, we celebrated with a lunch at the Faculty Club. My mother took too many pictures of us on the concrete benches outside. My mother still has an enlargement framed and mounted from that day. I used to wish that she would take it down. But it commemorates an important day in our family: my sister's graduation, my rape trial.
I don't remember the airport. I remember the rush from a day of celebration into the onset of dread. Once in Syracuse, we were met by Detective John Murphy from the DA's office. This man, with prematurely gray hair and a friendly smile, approached my father and me as we located the signs for the main terminal.
"You must be Alice," he said, and extended his hand.
"Yes." How had he known me?
He introduced himself to my father and to me, told us his job-to act as our escort over the next twenty-four hours-and offered to carry my bag. As we walked briskly toward the exit, he explained our accommodations and that Gail would meet us in the cafe in the lobby.
"She wants to go over the testimony," he said.
Finally, I asked, "How did you know who I was?"
He looked blankly at me. "They showed me some photos."
"I would have hoped I looked better than that, if they're the photos you mean."
My father was tense; he walked at a remove from us.
"You're a beautiful girl, you can tell that even in those photos," Murphy said. He was smooth. He knew the answers to give and the things to say.
In the county car on the way to the hotel, Murphy talked over his shoulder to my father, making eye contact with him in the rearview at lights and turns.
"Follow sports, Mr. Sebold?" he asked.
My father did not.
Murphy tried fishing.
My father did his best here but had little to go on. If Murphy had gotten up at 5:00 A.M. to study Cicero, they might have had something to start with.
We ended up on Madison.
"Even in holding," Murphy said, "I might go up there and say 'thanks' to a guy, act all friendly with him. Then I leave. That gets them in trouble with the other inmates, makes them look like an informer. I'll do that to that puke if you want."
I don't remember my response, if I had any. I was aware of my father's discomfort and, in turn, aware that my own comfort with such talk had grown during the last year. I liked men like Murphy. Their quick, exact talk. Their no-bones-about-it demeanor.
"They don't like rapists," Murphy informed my father. "It can go rough on them. They hate child molesters the most, but rapists aren't much above."
My father acted interested, but I think he was scared. He found talk like this distasteful. He liked to be in control of a discussion and if he wasn't, he usually opted out. This meant his paying attention itself was something out of the ordinary.
"You know, my girlfriend's name is Alice," Murphy said.
"Really?" my father said, taking interest.
"Yep. We've been together for some time now. When I heard your daughter's name was Alice, I had a good feeling about this case."
"We're quite fond of the name ourselves," my father said.
I told Detective Murphy about how my father had wanted to name me Hepzibah. That it was only because of my mother's vehement objection that the idea died.
He liked this. It made him laugh and I repeated the name until he got it right.
"That's a doozy," he said. "You lucked out."
We turned onto the main street of Syracuse's downtown. In May, it was still light at 7:30 P.M., but the stores were closed. We passed by Foley's department store. The cursive script and old brass security gates comforted me.
Up on our left I could see the marquee for the Hotel Syracuse. It too belonged to a more prosperous past. The old lobby was bustling. John Murphy checked us in at the reservation desk and showed us where the restaurant was. He told us he would return for us at nine the following morning.
"Have dinner. Gail said she'd be by sometime around eight o'clock tonight." He handed me a blue folder. "This is material she thought it might be useful for you to go over."
My father thanked him earnestly for his escort.
"No problem, Mr. Sebold," Murphy said. "I'm off to see my own Alice now."
We parked our bags in the room upstairs and returned to the lobby. I didn't want to eat but I did want a drink. In the bar area of the restaurant, my father and I sat at a small round table. We ordered gin and tonics. "Your mother doesn't have to know," he said. Gin and tonics were my father's drink. When I was eleven, I had watched him drink an entire pitcher on the day President Nixon resigned. My father went off to call my mother. She and her own mother and my sister would be sitting tight, she said, waiting for any news.
While he was gone I opened the blue folder. On top was a copy of my testimony from the preliminary hearing. I hadn't seen it before. I read over it, covering the page as I went with the folder itself. I didn't want anyone there-the young businessmen, the older salesmen, and the sole professional woman-to see what I held in my hands.
My father returned, trying not to disturb me while I was going over my words. He pulled out a small book in Latin that he'd brought from home.
"That doesn't look like good dinner material!"
I looked up. It was Gail. She was pointing to the blue folder. At three weeks before her projected delivery date, she wore a blue maternity T-shirt, tan corduroy pants, and running shoes. She had her glasses on, which I hadn't seen before, and she carried a briefcase with her.
"You must be Dr. Sebold," she said.
Score one for Gail, I thought. I had told her once that my father was a Ph.D. and hated being called Mister.
My father stood up to shake her hand. "Call me Bud," he said.
He offered to get her a drink. She said water would be fine, and as he went to the bar, she sat down beside me, bracing her arm on the back of the chair as she lowered herself down.
"Boy, you're really pregnant!" I said.
"You can say that again. I'm ready for the arrival. Billy Mastine," she said, referring to the district attorney, "gets the case because the sight of a pregnant woman makes the judge nervous." She was laughing but I didn't like it. I never considered anyone else my attorney. She, not the district attorney, had driven over on her off-hours to review the case. She was my lifeline, and the idea that she was being punished for being pregnant seemed another anti-woman maneuver to me.
"You know, Husa, your GYN, she's pregnant too. Eight months. Paquette is going to bust. All us pregnant ladies surrounding him. Cross-examining us makes them look bad."
My father returned and we got down to business. She excused herself to my father, saying that she didn't mean to be rude.
"Billy and I think that his attorney might go with an impotency defense."
My father listened hard. He played with the two onions at the bottom of his second drink, a Gibson.
"How can they prove that?" I asked, and Gail and I laughed. We imagined them bringing a doctor in to testify to the fact.
Gail broke down the three kinds of rapists.
"In all the studies they've done it seems like Gregory fits into the most common one. He's a power rapist. The others are anger rapists and the worst, sadistic."