In that late winter of 1980 when Rhonda was four years old the story of the stabbing began to be told in the Karr household on Broadmead Road, Princeton, New Jersey. Many times the story was told and retold but never in the presence of the Karrs’ daughter who was too young and too sensitive for such a terrifying and ugly story and what was worse, a story that seemed to be missing an ending. Did the stabbed man die? — he must have died. Was the killer caught? — he must have been caught. Rhonda could not ask because Rhonda was supposed not to know what had happened, or almost happened, to Mommy on that day in Manhattan when she’d driven in alone as Daddy did not like Mommy to do. Nothing is more evident to a child of even ordinary curiosity and canniness than a family secret, a “taboo” subject — and Rhonda was not an ordinary child. There she stood barefoot in her nightie in the hall outside her parents’ bedroom where the door was shut against her daring to listen to her parents’ lowered, urgent voices inside; silently she came up behind her distraught-sounding mother as Madeleine sat on the edge of a chair in the kitchen speaking on the phone as so frequently Madeleine spoke on the phone with her wide circle of friends. The most horrible thing! A nightmare! It happened so quickly and there was nothing anyone could do and afterward… Glancing around to see Rhonda in the doorway, startled and murmuring Sorry! No more right now, my daughter is listening.
Futile to inquire what Mommy was talking about, Rhonda knew. What had happened that was so upsetting and so ugly that when Rhonda pouted wanting to know she was told Mommy wasn’t hurt, Mommy is all right — that’s all that matters.
And Not fit for the ears of a sweet little girl like you. No no!
Very soon after Mrs. Karr began to tell the story of the stabbing on a Manhattan street, Mr. Karr began to tell the story too. Except in Mr. Karr’s excitable voice the story of the stabbing was considerably altered for Rhonda’s father was not faltering or hesitant like Rhonda’s mother but a professor of American studies at the University, a man for whom speech was a sort of instrument, or weapon, to be boldly and not meekly brandished; and so when Mr. Karr appropriated his wife’s story it was in a zestful storytelling voice like a TV voice — in fact, Professor Gerald Karr was frequently seen on TV — PBS, Channel 13 in New York City — discussing political issues — bewhiskered, with glinting wire-rimmed glasses and a ruddy flushed face. Crude racial justice! Counter-lynching!
Not the horror of the incident was emphasized, in Mr. Karr’s telling, but the irony. For the victim, in Mr. Karr’s version of the stabbing, was a Caucasian male and the delivery-van assailant was a black male — or, variously, a person of color. Rhonda seemed to know that Caucasian meant white, though she had no idea why; she had not heard her mother identify Caucasian, person of color in her accounts of the stabbing for Mrs. Karr dwelt almost exclusively on her own feelings — her fear, her shock, her dismay and disgust — how eager she’d been to return home to Princeton — she’d said very little about either of the men as if she hadn’t seen them really but only just the stabbing It happened so fast — it was just so awful — that poor man bleeding like that! — and no one could help him. And the man with the knife just — drove away… But Mr. Karr who was Rhonda’s Daddy and an important professor at the University knew exactly what the story meant for the young black man with the knife — the young person of color — was clearly one of an exploited and disenfranchised class of urban ghetto dwellers rising up against his oppressors crudely striking as he could, class-vengeance, an instinctive “lynching,” the white victim is collateral damage in the undeclared and unacknowledged but ongoing class war. The fact that the delivery-van driver had stabbed — killed? — a pedestrian was unfortunate of course, Mr. Karr conceded — a tragedy of course — but who could blame the assailant who’d been provoked, challenged — hadn’t the pedestrian struck his vehicle and threatened him — shouted obscenities at him — a good defense attorney could argue a case for self-defense — the van driver was protecting himself from imminent harm, as anyone in his situation might do. For there is such a phenomenon as racial instinct, self-protectiveness. Kill that you will not be killed.
As Mr. Karr was not nearly so hesitant as Mrs. Karr about interpreting the story of the stabbing, in ever more elaborate and persuasive theoretical variants with the passing of time, so Mr. Karr was not nearly so careful as Mrs. Karr about shielding their daughter from the story itself. Of course — Mr. Karr never told Rhonda the story of the stabbing, directly. Rhonda’s Daddy would not have done such a thing for though Gerald Karr was what he called ultra-liberal he did not truly believe — all the evidence of his intimate personal experience suggested otherwise! — that girls and women should not be protected from as much of life’s ugliness as possible, and who was there to protect them but men? — fathers, husbands. Against his conviction that marriage is a bourgeois convention, ludicrous, unenforceable, yet Gerald Karr had entered into such a (legal, moral) relationship with a woman, and he meant to honor that vow. And he would honor that vow, in all the ways he could. So it was, Rhonda’s father would not have told her the story of the stabbing and yet by degrees Rhonda came to absorb it for the story of the stabbing was told and retold by Mr. Karr at varying lengths depending upon Mr. Karr’s mood and/or the mood of his listeners, who were likely to be university colleagues, or visiting colleagues from other universities. Let me tell you — this incident that happened to Madeleine — like a fable out of Aesop. Rhonda was sometimes a bit confused — her father’s story of the stabbing shifted in minor ways — West Street became West Broadway, or West Houston — West Twelfth Street at Seventh Avenue — the late-winter season became midsummer — in Mr. Karr’s descriptive words the fetid heat of Manhattan in August. In a later variant of the story which began to be told sometime after Rhonda’s seventh birthday when her father seemed to be no longer living in the large stucco-and-timber house on Broadmead with Rhonda and her mother but elsewhere — for a while in a minimally furnished university-owned faculty residence overlooking Lake Carnegie, later a condominium on Canal Pointe Road, Princeton, still later a stone-and-timber Tudor house on a tree-lined street in Cambridge, Massachusetts — it happened that the story of the stabbing became totally appropriated by Mr. Karr as an experience he’d had himself and had witnessed with his own eyes from his vehicle — not the Volvo but the Toyota station wagon — stalled in traffic less than ten feet from the incident: the delivery van braking to a halt, the pedestrian who’d been crossing against the light — Caucasian, male, arrogant, in a Burberry trench coat, carrying a briefcase — doomed — had dared to strike a fender of the van, shout threats and obscenities at the driver and so out of the van the driver had leapt, as Mr. Karr observed with the eyes of a front-line war correspondent — Dark-skinned young guy with dreadlocks like Medusa, must’ve been Rastafarian — swift and deadly as a panther — the knife, the slashing of the pedestrian’s throat — a ritual, a ritual killing — sacrifice — in Mr. Karr’s version just a single powerful swipe of the knife and again as in a nightmare cinematic replay which Rhonda had seen countless times and had dreamt yet more times there erupted the incredible six-foot jet of blood even as the stricken man kept walking, trying to walk — to escape which was the very heart of the story — the revelation toward which all else led.