TWENTY-SIX

IN THE Voyeur’s annual report of 1977—and specifically on the Thursday evening of November 10, 1977—there was reference to a situation in which the Voyeur saw, for the first time in his life, more than he wished to see.

What he saw was a murder.

It occurred in Room 10.

He described the occupants as an attractive young white couple who had rented Room 10 for more than a week. The male was a slim six-footer of about 180 pounds in his early twenties. The Voyeur deduced from his eavesdropping that the male was a college dropout and small-time drug dealer. The female was a well-proportioned blonde with a 34D-22-36 figure. The Voyeur had checked and verified her bra size after entering the room while the couple was elsewhere.

The couple exhibited a vigorous sex life, indulging in oral sex and intercourse on at least a nightly basis since moving in, and an approving account of this was noted by the Voyeur. Also described, however, were incidents in which drugs were sometimes sold to people visiting Room 10, and, while the Voyeur was upset by what he saw, he never considered notifying the police. In the past he had reported the presence of drug usage and trading (most recently in the case of the teenager in Room 11 who was having sex with his sister), but the police took no action because he would not identify himself as an eyewitness to his complaint.

On the afternoon of November 10, 1977, however, after noticing that drugs were being sold in Room 10 to a few young boys, one of whom appeared to be no older than twelve, Gerald Foos wrote in The Voyeur’s Journal:

The Voyeur was angry and decided that he himself must take action to stop this dealer in Room l0 from selling more drugs.

After the male subject left the room that afternoon, the Voyeur entered the room. He knew exactly where the drugs were hidden. The Voyeur, without any guilt, silently flushed all the remaining drugs and marijuana down the toilet. There were approximately ten bags of marijuana and many other assorted pills, and they all went to their watery grave.

This satisfied the Voyeur, and his only remaining wish was that he could appear in the million or so other places where drugs exist, and destroy them also. The Voyeur had accomplished the elimination of other drugs that he had seen other dealers selling, but these villains had never suspected the Voyeur. They just vacated the premises of the motel, thinking the drugs had been misplaced or someone of their immediate acquaintance had stolen them. They did not notify the police or complain. They simply left the motel without knowing what happened to their perilous commodities.

In describing this latest situation unfolding between the male subject and female subject in Room 10, the Voyeur is going to be very brief and only state that the male subject had blamed the female subject for taking his disappeared drugs. After fighting and arguing for about one hour, the scene below the voyeur turned to violence. This was a horrible experience, very offensive and ­startling—the white male struck a blow to her head, which apparently stunned her, and she yelled: “You hurt me, don’t do that,” and he replied: “Where are my drugs, you bitch? Tell me, or I’ll kill you.” She said: “I don’t know! I didn’t do anything with them.”

He didn’t believe her, and continued to hit her in the face. Then, suddenly, she kicked him in the groin area, and he really got mad. The male subject grabbed the female subject by the neck and strangled her until she fell unconscious to the floor.

The male subject, then in a panic, picked up all his things and fled the vicinity of the motel.

The Voyeur in observing from the vent, and without doubt, could see the chest of the female subject moving—which indicated to the Voyeur that she was still alive and therefore O.K. So, the Voyeur was convinced in his own mind that the female subject had survived the strangulation assault and would be all right, and he swiftly departed the observation platform for the evening.

After the Voyeur arrived at the motel office he carefully considered what he had observed, and upon reconsideration he definitely concluded that the female was alright, and, if she wasn’t alright, then he couldn’t do anything anyway, because at this moment in time he was only an observer and not a reporter, and really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned.

The next morning, the maid who was cleaning rooms rushed into the motel office and said that a woman was dead in Room 10. The Voyeur immediately called the police, who began an extensive investigation. The Voyeur could only provide the name of the male subject who occupied the room with the female subject, his description, make of car, license number, and that he was in the room with the female subject the evening she was killed. The Voyeur could never provide information that he actually witnessed the male subject’s assault of the female subject last evening.

The Voyeur had finally come to grips with his own morality and would have to forever suffer in silence, but he would never condemn his conduct or behavior in this situation.

After the police had checked out their leads, they returned to the motel to report:

The information was bogus. The suspect was using a fake name, a fake address, and a fake license plate on a stolen car.

When I read this account in New York a few years after I’d visited him in ­Aurora—and nearly six years after the ­murder—I was shocked and surprised. I thought that the Voyeur’s detached and irre­sponsible response to the fracas in Room 10 was similar to the behavior of New York crime witnesses when a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager named Kitty Genovese was being attacked by a man with a knife on a street in Queens shortly after 3:00 a.m. on March 13, 1964.

Although some facts in this case were later disputed—among them that the initial estimate of thirty-eight murder witnesses was an exaggerated number—there was no dispute that several people in Queens saw at least part of the brutality from their apartment windows, and that none of them rushed down into the street in time to rescue or assist the young woman who would soon bleed to death. The New York Times, which broke the story, quoted one unidentified neighbor as saying that he told another neighbor to telephone the police because “I didn’t want to get involved.”

Gerald Foos’s explanation in his journal—he was “only an observer and not a reporter,” and he “really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned”—were explanations that didn’t surprise me because of his often-expressed notion that he was a fractured individual, a hybridized combination of the Voyeur and Gerald Foos, and he was also desperately protective of his secret life in the attic. If the police had grilled him and decided that he knew more than he was telling them, they might have obtained a search warrant to explore his property, including his attic, and the consequences could have been catastrophic.

I telephoned Foos right away to ask about the situation. I wanted to find out whether he realized that, in addition to witnessing a murder, he might have in some way caused it. He was reluctant to say more than he had written in his journal, while reminding me that I had signed a secrecy agreement. He might have also reminded me that I was now a coconspirator in whatever crimes he had committed. I spent a few sleepless nights asking myself whether I ought to turn Foos in or continue to honor the agreement he had asked me to sign at the baggage claim in Denver in January 1980. But even though he had in some way caused the young woman’s death years before by flushing the drugs, had failed to stop the boyfriend as he strangled her, and had callously failed to call for help until the next day because he claimed to see her chest rising and falling, I did not believe Gerald Foos was a murderer. And he had told the police all he knew about the identity of the drug dealer and his girlfriend—who it was now too late to save.

I filed away his notes on the murder along with all the other material he had mailed me earlier in the year. I now knew all that I wanted to know about the Voyeur.

When I learned about the murder I was busy researching a book that would soon take me out of the country. I planned to write about the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century immigration of Italians to America, a story that would include the personal experiences of my grandparents and parents as well as my own boyhood recollections of growing up on the Jersey Shore during World War II, while my father’s two younger brothers were in the Italian army trying to resist the Allied invasion.

In 1982, having finished interviewing my parents and other relatives who had settled in the United States, I took an apartment in Rome, and later in southern Italy, to learn about the lives of my kinsmen who had remained in their homeland. In the winter of 1985, I rented a house for five months in Taormina, Sicily, to begin writing the book that would be published years later as Unto the Sons. Joining me in Taormina was my wife, Nan, an editor at Houghton Mifflin who remained active with her firm in Boston while doing her reading and editing in Sicily; and among our occasional houseguests were our twenty-one-year-old daughter, Pamela, then an intern with the Paris Tribune, and our eighteen-year-old daughter Catherine, a sophomore at Bard College.

But throughout these years, from the 1980s through the 1990s, whether I was in New York or overseas, the mail continued to bring me personal greetings and attic-observed information from Gerald Foos in Aurora, Colorado. He reported that the police had so far failed to track down the man who had killed the woman in Room 10, but that the police had been summoned to his Manor House Motel for other matters.

He mentioned that one male guest had committed suicide, shooting himself with a pistol. He noted that a 400-pound guest had suffered a fatal heart attack and that his body, bloated overnight, could not fit through the doorway and therefore the room’s main window had to be removed in order for the body to be carried out to the coroner’s vehicle. One guest, a married father of two, died confronting a burglar. The fight woke up his family, who heard the gunshot that killed him. Gerald Foos also reported that another guest had died while masturbating, collapsing with his fingers so rigidly clinging to his penis that the ambulance crew was obliged to carry him away in that condition.

In addition to these happenings, Gerald Foos complained of being privy to many other unappealing or appalling examples of human behavior, including robbery, incest, bestiality, and rape—and, even among so-called consenting couples, instances of sexual exploitation. Gerald Foos believed that the legalization of the birth control pill in the early 1960s, which he favored despite being a practicing Roman Catholic, encouraged many men to expect sex on demand. “Yes, the pill allowed women to control their fertility,” he conceded, “but she also assumed most of the responsibility, and the blame, if she accidentally became pregnant. The man in her life would ask, ‘Have you taken your pill, darling?’ and then assume that the issue was settled: for him it was a green light for sex, a quick orgasm, and deep sleep. Women had won the legal right to choose but had lost the right to choose the right moment.”

In the years when his parents were a courting couple, as well as when he himself was dating Barbara White in high school, Gerald Foos singled out the fear of pregnancy and the illegality of abortions as big factors in minimizing premarital intercourse. If unmarried couples became pregnant, in most cases it was considered morally obligatory, if not mandatory under a statute, to authenticate the relationship with a marriage.

Gerald Foos said that as a seventeen-year-old farm girl, his mother, Natalie, had been practicing the rhythm method with her boyfriend, Jake, but had “made a mistake”—and thus she was five months pregnant with Gerald on her wedding day in 1934. Gerald went on to say that while the availability of the pill and the redefinition of moral standards in the 1960s helped to phase out “shotgun” marriages in America, he was not sure that the Sexual Revolution had produced anything that refuted his negative recounting of what he saw from his attic and reported in The Voyeur’s Journal.

Between the 1970s and 1980s, our country went to war with one another. They had battles with words and images, through law and politics, over what made men and women full citizens of the nation. Across two generations, they argued and fought over everything from women’s role in the job market, to their attempt to control reproduction, because of the pill, and from men’s role as breadwinner to whether they could love each other and marry, and other things and issues like gender, sex, and family.

During many nights’ observations of subjects below the vents, the Voyeur could confirm again and again these on-going quarrels between women and men, which were characterized by unhappy sexual relations and interactions, while at the same time little seemed to be going right as they referred to their responsibilities and jobs in the outside world. When in bed together they lay there for hours watching TV. When men were alone they watched TV and masturbated. Women when alone masturbated too, although not as much. But I think both sexes are now masturbating more than ever. The only couples who seem to enjoy pleasing one another in bed, and to have the patience and desire to give one another orgasms, are lesbians.