III
The next day I place the “Do Not Disturb” on my outside doorknob and tune in the internet stream of Diana’s NPR station on my new laptop. “Hither and Yon” will begin in a few moments.
On the bedside table are two little plastic cups of pudding. It is tapioca pudding, in a twin pack that I picked up at a convenience store around the corner, an anomaly in the Old City. Next to the tapioca is a canister from the same store. The contents of the canister an enticement, since I have always loved the combination of tapioca with whipped cream. There is otherwise nothing special about the whipped cream, just as there is nothing special about the tapioca, but it will do. I intend to use the whipped cream liberally.
I guess I should say here that there was originally nothing special about the tapioca. But now I have stirred it with a plastic spoon to mix in a special concoction that, if I have followed directions properly, should prove painlessly lethal. I lay prone on the bed and think of Bo and Peep and their minions, and of Michael Dorris. I am not emulating any of them in any particulars except for their tidiness, and the tidiness that informed their final actions.
At noon I reach down to untie my shoes, but I stop when I hear the voice of Diana’s co-host: “I’m Robert Otis. It’s ‘Hither and Yon.’ Diana Ryerson is off today.” He teases the program’s highlights. Then, after a pregnant pause, he says, “First, the news.”
This is upsetting. Diana never takes Wednesdays off unless she is seriously ill or we are away together on a full-scale family vacation. My notion that I could spend my last moments listening to the bells ringing in her voice, drifting off to dream of what might have been if it had not been for Bruce Gibbs and his father, is itself destroyed. This is not really any reason to reconsider my rather impulsive plan, but it is disconcerting, and I know the limits of my courage: I do not want to allow any uneasiness to contaminate my uncharacteristically dramatic act of departure. Should I wait a day? Should I go for a little walk in the Old City to clear my head, to collect myself, to see if I can tune in to a new approach?
I insist on a final litany of hollow claims: I am not a runner. Flight is not my style. I am not a quitter. But I know when I am beaten. Bruce Gibbs, of all the lame slimeballs on the face of the earth, you have crushed me.
And if there needs to be a proof of the totality of my surrender to your conquest, it is that some not insignificant part of my consciousness is dimly engaged by the notion that there is justice coming in my self-inflicted demise.
For decades I have looked forward to my golden years. My vision was of Diana and I growing old together, traveling together, putting our feet up together on the front porch of some comfortable old place in the country, making sweet randy old people’s love together, with the help of a little medication if necessary. It all seemed fine. Better than fine.
I will admit that this vision was well-lubricated with my confidence that I would be a venerable old man, revered as an avuncular old warhorse of the left, interviewed or profiled on NPR from time to time, my family and friends around me, maybe even a grandchild or two when and if Rachel or Sam got to that point in their lives. I would keep myself in good condition and continue to live a serious and somewhat committed life, but it would be comfortable, cozy, like Garrison Keillor’s goofy parody commercials for the Ketchup Advisory Council: “These are the good times for Barb and me.”
Not so fast, Stanley. I have no interest in growing old as a pariah, as a perceived pervert, or as a prison inmate who would not even be visited by his wife and daughter, living in protective custody so that instead of getting a steel shank in the chest I need only submit to an hour a day of heckling when I go out with my pal Christopher Reardon for our daily exercise.
Christopher Reardon. I dreamed of him last night. He and Bruce Gibbs were walking around the track with me, offering me goodies. Earplugs. A color television set. A Walkman. “You’ll definitely need a fan in your cell in the summertime.” They were very reasonable, but not at all remorseful. I wanted to discuss their offenses, their essential monstrousness as human beings.
“When did you know that you were not going to be able keep from repeating what your father did to you?” I asked Bruce Gibbs.
Christopher Reardon laughed aloud at my question.
“That’s a good one, Branford,” he said. “You’re a very funny guy.”
“What?” I asked. “What’s funny about that?”
“You just don’t get it,” said Bruce. “Why would I want to keep from repeating what my father taught me? It was the most wonderful thing a boy could experience. It was like swimming naked together in a secret pond on a beautiful day, me and little Mary Kate, playing together almost every afternoon.”
I had a picture of Mary Kate in my mind then, in my dream. Little Mary Kate, as hairless as a baby, playful and big-eyed as she had been our night on the rooftop, pleasing herself and Bruce Gibbs, if that is the word, while his father looked on. The father did not direct them, because he did not need to. The image stayed with me when I awaken at four o’clock this morning and has stayed with me since, tormenting me all day. I could not even recover the source dream at first, just the picture of my Mary Kate, my sweet young girl, ecstatic in her playful dream world with Bruce Gibbs. The torment and pain were unrelenting, not in any pain I witnessed on her face, because I saw no pain, only exquisite pleasure: it was just a childhood game. Freud’s phrase: polymorphous perversity. What was the difference between this image and little children playing doctor? Playing “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine?”
The difference was total: the monster Gibbs, Gibbs the elder, stole her childhood. He stole her childhood and along the way he stole Bruce’s, and probably Ramona’s, and maybe even Rachel’s, too.
Another nightmare fragment floats into my conscious mind: what is this?
“Remember when she shaved it, Branford?” asked Bruce Gibbs as the three of us walked around the track in the Big Yard at Concord. “Did she say it was for you? Did you think it was for you? Did you like it, Branford? I asked her if you liked it and she wouldn’t tell me. Don’t worry about that, Branford, because she never talked out of school where you were concerned. She loved you like a motherfucker, and she always kept her own counsel, about you anyway. You were her best hope, Branford. I was her worst nightmare. But if you think about it, I think you’ll realize she didn’t shave it for you. She shaved it for somebody who has a fine appreciation for that sort of thing. You know who that is, don’t you, Branford?”
Bruce and Reardon and I were keeping up a smart pace, like power-walking soccer moms. I put my hand out again and asked Reardon: if he still had those little rubber earplugs, could I get them now?
“Sure, Branford, you can have the earplugs,” said Christopher Reardon. “As soon as you answer Bruce’s question.”
“Who did she shave it for, Stanley? You know who it was, don’t you? Who do you think liked it nice and smooth, Stanley? Just like Myst and her girlfriends.”
We walk a few more steps in silence before, in my dream, Bruce Gibbs and Christopher Reardon speak up together:
“Just like Rachel, Stanley.”
And this fragment then dredges up another, despite my best efforts to hold it at bay:
The final fragment is the one that keeps tormenting me, that won’t let me go, that made me bolt upright in the hotel bed and scream – was it silently or at the top of my lungs? – well before dawn this morning:
I cannot get the earplugs from Christopher Reardon. I cannot answer Bruce Gibbs. I cannot clear my mind finally of an image of four-year-old Rachel playing in the bath as I toss her little yellow ducky into the bathtub with her again and again and she splashes about and chortles with glee ands throws it onto the bathroom floor again each time, thrilled that I am letting her make messy puddles on the floor. In the moment of this fragment I experience an instant of total relief as I laugh with satisfaction at Rachel’s ecstasy – she could lose herself in this happiness so soon after she learned that her mother was dying! – then I watch with new horror as her face morphs into the face of the little girl I saw on the monitor last Thursday, bracing herself against a kitchen counter, anguish contorting her face as she looks back at me now and wails, “Daddy, Daddy, don’t let him hurt me.”
This is more than I can take. It is why I must do this, and why I cannot do it. It is why I want to line my shoes up at the end of my hotel bed and eat my pudding and lie back down flat, prone, on my mattress, And why I must not.
I cannot let him hurt her, but what can I do? How does a man fight this battle without any weapon, without any battlefield, without any enemy?
I have to do something. I have to find a way to fight my way back into my children’s lives, to help them make it to the safer shores of adulthood.
Can I save their lives and in the process save my own?
Robert Otis drones on, on the radio. I sit up sideways on the bed, and place my feet squarely on the floor. I reach over to turn off the radio. I am still wearing my fancy trail running shoes from L.L. Bean.
I must not lie down again. There is a knock at the door. It pisses me off that the housekeeping woman just ignores the hotel’s own “Do Not Disturb” sign.
I close my eyes and press in on my temples, hoping that she will go away.
“Leave me alone,” I say in a whispered monotone. Are my words intended for the housekeeper, or am I addressing my own encroaching dream life? I am desperate for peace.
“Leave me alone.”
When I repeat the words this second time I am surprised and embarrassed by the way they spill out of me in an agonized whine.
Approaching Concord, New Hampshire, before I stopped to buy clothes on my way up here, I passed a motel, just off the highway, called the Brick Tower Motor Inn. I had a strong urge to stop there, not to stay overnight but to poke around, to investigate. I recognized the name of the motel from reading the newspaper after the author Michael Dorris committed suicide there several years ago.
Dorris, not long before, had been at the top of his game as a novelist and memoirist. He and Louise Erdrich, his wife, were almost everybody’s favorite literary couple, and they were committed American Indian activists to boot. Erdrich had written several wonderful, highly acclaimed, and even somewhat popular novels including Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. Dorris seemed less prolific, but his Yellow Raft in Blue Water was magical, and he had also written a heart-wrenching memoir about their struggles with an adopted son’s fetal alcohol syndrome. Their celebrity was not quite at the level, say, of Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange, but at Dartmouth College where they both graced the faculty they were shining stars in a more modest firmament.
The only thing about Dorris that, for me, never quite fit was that in his flyleaf or back cover photographs he always looked far too clean, too smooth, too tidy. He did not look anything like my conception of an American Indian, and – not that this would ever happen – I imagine that if he were to show up for a model’s call to appear in a photo shoot for The Gap or Abercrombie & Fitch they would tell him to try them back next week with a few days’ growth of beard. For me to be persuaded that was a serious novelist, let alone a serious American Indian, I needed a more textured visual.
Then his life was destroyed in a matter of a few days. Dorris and Erdrich had adopted several children, and there were public charges that Dorris had molested one or more of the children. There was an official investigation, and enough public commentary that Dorris told a friend, “My life is over.” I cannot remember every detail, but one day he was a leading literary figure and then – KAPOW! – it was over.
The next I heard was that Dorris was found dead at the Brick Tower Motor Inn outside Concord, New Hampshire, roughly half the distance between Dartmouth College and Boston. The implementation of his suicide seemed in keeping with what I had thought of as his anomalous cover-art photographs: it was remarkable for its tidiness. He left a suicide note apologizing to the hotel maid for creating a mess. I was relatively certain that Dorris was not a trans-humanist and that he did not expect that his body would be claimed or retrieved by extra-terrestrials, but in his suicide he seemed to mimic the then fairly recent deaths of Bo and Peep and their dozen or so Heaven’s Gate adherents who had committed suicide en masse in a house out in Southern California, lining up their sneakers just so and lying neatly atop their beds after downing little servings of death-pudding.
Talk about going out with a whimper. Louise Erdrich did not have much to say publicly about the entire business. She prevailed upon the court in Minnesota to have the documents of the investigation sealed, but it seemed clear to me in what little she did say that she neither cleared Dorris’ name nor diminished the gravity of the accusations against him. This was as it should be, I judged. All of her energy was devoted to the children, who were of various ages from young adult on down.
I wondered about Michael Dorris’ last thoughts. Was he angry about the incredibly rapid transformation of his life? Had he anticipated this doom for months, for years, or ever since his own childhood? Why suicide? Sure, it all had to be a colossal bummer, but as an acclaimed writer, why wouldn’t he try to explain himself, to re-invent himself, or if all else failed to crucify and redeem himself? Had he done what was charged? Diddled his own children, or worse? Were there degrees to such offenses?
I tried to imagine myself in Michael Dorris’ shoes. Assuming that he was guilty, which would be worse: his own knowledge of what he had done, or others’ knowledge? If somehow he was not guilty, but he knew he could not get himself fully cleared of all the charges, did his innocence even matter? Wouldn’t living the balance of his life with that terrible social stigma be every bit as bad as the knowledge – if he had done the crimes -- of having done them, of having ruined his own adopted children’s lives? What kind of slick-faced little monster was he, that he could play the do-gooder and seem to be saving these Indian kids’ lives by adopting and nurturing them, only to turn around and betray them by doing unspeakable things to them? What kind of man could actually derive sexual arousal and release from taking out his penis and using it on his children, adopted or otherwise?
He deserved to die, I believe now. But had he administered his own suicide as self-punishment? I don’t think so. More likely, I suspected, his neatly planned suicide was a final act of self-deluding narcissism. He thought, perhaps, that he would show the world something by depriving it of his literary and personal gifts, and in the process make his accusers scapegoats for his own death. One last fucking, he would give his own children. And his wife Louise, not exactly his accuser, but no doubt implicated in turning the charges over to the authorities, and certainly not his defender.
Of course this is all speculation on my part, and the subtext is doubtless that I am trying to find some way of rationalizing or aggrandizing the act of personal cowardice I am contemplating. I am not trying to emulate Dorris or Bo and Peep in any substantive way. If I am emulating Dorris it is probably for the same reason he aped Bo and Peep: tidiness and ease. Here is a means of committing suicide that is very dramatically not an act of self-punishment. It is so tidy that it is almost pleasant.
Am I so weak? Must I be so weak? Can’t I take a punch? I remember when I was twelve, playing at being Mohammed Ali, zipping and zinging Bruce Gibbs with punches. He stood in there and took his medicine. I remember being impressed, because I knew he wanted with every fiber of his being to get down on his hands and knees to try to put his eyeglasses back together. Whatever he may deserve today – and I still think that I would try to kill him if I could lay my hands on him at this moment – he surely deserved nothing then, nothing more nor less than what I deserve today. He stood in.
So what is the worst that can happen to me, if I can summon the courage to try to save my own life and my children’s lives? Probably nothing worse than having to think about my actions and my responses: to be afflicted with a constitutional need to reflect on the things I do before I do them, and to have to try to find meaning in them after they are done.
I take the canister of whipped cream from the night table and throw it across the room into the wastebasket.
The knock comes at the door again. Whatever, I think, reminding myself of Rachel. The hotel maid must have heard the canister crashing into the wastebasket and been concerned that I was trashing the room. Since when does the housekeeping staff take such responsibility?
I walk to the door, open it, and step back without even looking up. I am not a snob, but I am not about to make contact with a hotel maid who will not or cannot even read or respect a “Do Not Disturb” sign.
In walk Diana and Rachel.
“Daddy, I’m so sorry,” says Rachel. They are both sobbing, and all over me with hugs and consolation.
“Stanley.” Diana reaches for my hands, which hang limp at my sides. I do not reach back in any active way, but I allow her to hold my hands in hers momentarily. When she attempts to hug me my hands fall back to my sides and I seem to have no choice but to stand somewhat stiffly in her grasp. This is not willful. It is not my intention to be contrary. I simply cannot summon any other physical possibility.
With Rachel I am not so noncommittal. I wrap my arms around her in a weak attempt to return her hug, and my face rests in her hair. But I know that in the unlikely event she was to step away quickly I would simply collapse to the floor.
“What happened?”
“I am so sorry, Stanley.”
“What happened? Why are you sorry?”
“I know. We know. You were framed for the whole thing.”
I know that the defiance that I feel just now is itself perverse, but it is not so easy to let go of it. Why now? Why place the blindfold over my eyes and let me stand before the firing squad and offer me a last cigarette, only then to grant me a reprieve? Why would I even want a reprieve? Am I supposed to put my faith in love again, after such utter abandonment?
“Yesterday I’m a monster and today you’re my loving wife again?”
I want to make them pay for turning their backs on me, but I don’t know if I have the moral energy. I move the little plastic cups of tapioca from the night table to the windowsill on the side of the bed away from them, as if by doing that I can hide from them what was about to occur in this hotel room.
“Daddy,” says Rachel, summoning some strength that brings me a tinge of pride, “Just listen to us for a minute.” She and Diana take seats in the little gray upholstered chairs at the foot of the bed. I sit on the edge of the bed and watch them. I am without affect again. I cannot sustain any reaction to them. I listen.
“Your friend Amy Tuckerman came over last night,” says Rachel. My heart races now.
“She found email messages that someone named Bruce Gibbs had been sending to Rachel,” says Diana.
“And emails I sent back to him.”
“That bastard,” I say, with barely enough breath to get the words out.
“I didn’t know who he was, Daddy. He wasn’t using his name, not that I would have known anyway. I could tell he was an older guy, but the rest of it, I had no clue.”
“The rest of it,” I say.
“Rachel and this Gibbs guy were making plans to meet and do something together when the emails stopped.”
“I don’t know if I would have gone. Nothing was said that didn’t seem innocent. But he paid so much attention to me. I might have.”
“He was manipulating her. He had just enough information to be very dangerous, to make it seem like he understood her innermost thoughts. The emails all seem so smooth, so unthreatening, so inviting.”
“Smooth as silk,” says Rachel.
“That was his online handle.”
“What was?”
“SilkDaddy,” they say together.
“But then everything stopped, just when the newspapers said you were dead,” says Rachel. “A couple of days passed and I started getting freaked out. I mean, I was already freaked out, but then it just got worse and worse.”
She looks at me through tears but in her sadness I see none of the anger that was there the last time I saw her.
“I’m so sorry, Daddy. I started thinking that SilkDaddy was you, because the emails stopped when I thought you had died. I was furiously writing emails and I’m all like when are you gonna pick me up and get me the hell out of here like we said, and oh by the way, where are you?”
“And SilkDaddy wasn’t responding,” says Diana.
“It looked like he wasn’t even checking his emails any more. I can’t explain it, but I was getting desperate.”
“Then last night Rachel noticed that the last few emails she sent to SilkDaddy had all been opened within a few minutes of each other.”
“So then Amy shows up and she’s all Rachel, I’m sorry, but we have to talk to your Mom about this SilkDaddy thing and I’m all No, No, No, we can’t.”
It occurs to me as I sit here listening to my daughter that I have not heard her sound this inarticulate – this much like every other teenager -- in a long time, if ever. Under other circumstances I might be embarrassed.
“But we did,” says Diana. “We sat down and for the first time Amy got my full attention. You have a good friend there, Stanley. For almost half an hour she barely even spoke. She just handed me the letter Bruce Gibbs wrote to you and some of the emails back and forth between Rachel and SilkDaddy. Then we talked. Really talked. And then we got in the car and took turns driving up here.”
“You took turns?”
“Me and Amy.”
“Where is Amy now?”
“In a room on the floor below us. Probably asleep.”
