Watching Kojak alone was endurable, because even though violent, it was so obviously fictional in this violence (Where was the smell? The blood? Why did all the victims have perfect faces and bodies?). But when my sister or father or mother came in to watch television with me, I grew tense.
I have memories of my sister sitting in the rocker in front of where I was positioned on the couch. She would always ask me if a given program was all right before turning it on. She would be vigilant throughout the hour or two hours it was on. If she worried, I would see her head start to turn around to check on me.
"I'm okay, Mary," I began saying, able to predict when she might grow concerned.
It made me angry with her and with my parents. I needed the pretense that inside the house I was still the same person I'd always been. It was ridiculous but essential, and I felt the stares of my family as betrayals, even though intellectually I knew otherwise.
What took me a bit longer to put together was that those television shows were more upsetting to them than they could ever have been to me. They had no idea, because I had not told them, what had happened to me in that tunnel-what the particulars were. They were fitting together the horrors of imagination and nightmare and trying to fashion what had been their sister's or child's reality. I knew exactly what had happened. But can you speak those sentences to the people you love? Tell them you were urinated on or that you kissed back because you did not want to die?
That question continues to haunt me. After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of. Some men and lesbians see it as a turn-on or a mission, as if by sexualizing our relationship they can pull me back from the wreckage of that day. Of course, their best efforts are largely useless. No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.
FIVE
My mother was warden of the vestry at St. Peter's Episcopal Church. We had been members of this church ever since my family moved to Pennsylvania when I was five. I liked the pastor, Father Breuninger, and his son, Paul, who was my age. In college, I would recognize Father Breuninger in the work of Henry Fielding; he was an amiable if not overly insightful man, and he stood in the center of a small, devoted congregation. Paul sold Christmas wreaths to the parishioners each year, and his wife, Phyllis, was tall and high-strung. This last quality made her a target for sympathetic, but competitive, commentary from my mother.
I liked to play in the graveyard after service; I liked my parents' pre- and post-commentary in the car; I liked being doted on by parishioners; and I loved, absolutely was infatuated with, Myra Narbonne. She was my favorite old lady-my mother's favorite too. Myra liked to say she "got old before it was popular." Often her large stomach was a punch line, or her thinning angel hair. Among a congregation filled with distinguished Main Line types, where the same outfits, perfectly tailored but within an inch of appearing downright shabby, were worn each and every Sunday, Myra was a breath of fresh air. She had all the blue blood she needed, but she wore large seventies wraparounds that were, in her words, "as tacky as tablecloths." Often her shirt didn't come together all the way, as her chest sloped closer and closer to the earth. She tucked Kleenex in her bra, which my own East Tennessee grandmother did, and she slipped me extra cookies when I came in from playing in the graveyard. She was married to a man named Ed. Ed didn't come often to service, but when he did he appeared to be thinking of how soon he could leave.
I had been to their house. They had a pool and liked to have young people swim in it. They had a dog they'd named Freckles, because of his spots, and a few cats, including the fattest calico I had ever seen. During junior high and high school, Myra nurtured my desire to be a painter. She painted herself, and had turned their greenhouse into her studio. I think she also understood, without ever discussing it with me, that I wasn't very happy at home.
During my freshman year, while I was in Syracuse going out with Mary Alice to the college bars along Marshall Street, things happened back home that were alien to me.
Myra left doors unlocked. She went in and out of the house to garden. Freckles needed putting out. They had never had any trouble, and although their house was positioned far back from the road and hidden by a veil of trees, they lived in a neighborhood of gentlemen farmers. So Myra couldn't have imagined a day when three men in black stocking masks would cut her phone lines before forcing their way in.
They separated Myra and Ed, and tied Myra up. They were unhappy with the lack of cash in the house. They beat Ed badly enough that he fell backward down the stairs to the basement level below. One man went down after him. One cased the house. One, whom the others called Joey, stayed with Myra, calling her "old woman," and hitting her with open-handed blows.
They took what they could. Joey told Myra to stay put, not to go anywhere, that her husband was dead. They left. Myra lay on the floor and struggled free of the rope. She could not get down the stairs to check on Ed because she felt something broken in her foot. They had also, though she didn't know it then, broken her ribs.
Defying Joey's orders, Myra left the house. She was too afraid to go out onto the road. She crawled through the underbrush behind the backyard-half a mile or so-before reaching another, less frequented road. She stood up, barefoot and bleeding. Finally a car approached and she flagged it down.
She went to the car window.
"Please get help," she said to the lone driver. "Three men broke into our house. I think they killed my husband."
"I can't help you, lady."
She realized who was in the car. It was Joey, and he was alone. It was his voice. She got a good look at him; there was no stocking mask.
"Get off me," he said, as she grabbed, in recognition, at his arm.
He sped away and she fell down in the road. But she kept going and reached a house, where she phoned for help. Ed was rushed to the hospital. If she had not left the house when she did, the doctors later told her, he would have bled to death.
Then, that winter, St. Peter's was rocked by Paul Breuninger's arrest.
Paul had stopped selling Christmas wreaths in junior high school. He grew his curly red hair long, and didn't come to church much anymore. My mother told me that Paul had a separate entrance to the house. That Father Breuninger felt he had lost control over him. In February, high on acid, Paul walked into a florist shop on Route 30 and asked a woman named Mrs. Mole for a single yellow rose. He and his partner, waiting in the car, had cased the joint for a week. Paul had asked for a single rose each time, watching the register as Mrs. Mole rang it up.
But they picked the wrong day to rob her. Her husband had left moments before with the week's cash. Mrs. Mole had less than four dollars in her cash drawer. Paul flew into a rage. He stabbed Mrs. Mole fifteen times in the face and neck, yelling, "Die, bitch, die," over and over again. Mrs. Mole did not obey. She made her way out of the shop, collapsing in a bank of snow outside. A woman saw the blood, which had slowly trickled down the rise of the bank. She followed the trail and found Mrs. Mole unconscious in the snow.
That May, after my rape, I arrived back to a congregation that was traumatized, no one more so than Father Breuninger himself. As the warden to the vestry, my mother had been privy to his pain that spring. Paul had been arrested, and though still a minor at seventeen, would be tried as an adult. Father Breuninger had no idea that his son had been drinking a fifth of whiskey a day since the age of fifteen. He knew nothing about the drugs found in Paul's room and little about his truancy at school. Paul's insolence Father Breuninger had chalked up to being part of an adolescent stage.