Chapter Six

Diminished Responsibility

Chapter 6

After the Game

Nineteen fifty-three, just after Abigail turned fourteen, was the year Frome High won the state football championship. On the night of January 10, at 9:00 P.M., the winning touchdown scored, setting in motion a number of traditional rites. The ritual tearing down of the goal-posts. The ritual beer bacchanal in the woods behind the stadium, beside the frozen Assonocket Reservoir. The ritual human sacrifice.

Abigail Mather, giddy with drink, was the only female remaining at midnight in a stronghold of brutally healthy young men. When the beer was gone they moved out on the thick ice, sliding, at first cautiously, then with increasing confidence. They formed a long hand-linked line, which became a circle, with Abigail at the center.

She flew across the starry night with her feet tucked up under her bottom and her head thrown back, held up by the steely arms of the young men. There was laughter, and then there wasn’t, and Abigail was alone, in the middle of the frozen lake, at the center of a rough circle of men…. No one was to know what was done to her that night. Ever. Until now.

Which was my fault, as I had refused to listen to her when she climbed into my bed at three in the morning, her hair filthy, reeking of dried beer, her body rank and strange. She smelled of copper and hops and fear and horses lathered by a killing run.

“Dorcas,” she said. “It’s wonderful.” My sister was trembling, in the grip, for the first time in her life, of something more powerful than herself. She squeezed one of my hips in her hand. “They’ll love you,” she said, laughing, as I tried to jerk out from under her. “They’d love you just as much. You can make them do anything! I know you’re not ready yet, but Oh, Dorcas, I wish I could show you now….”

I punched her soft stomach with all my strength. “Get out of my bed, you pig,” I whispered through my teeth. I hit her again. “Get away from me. Wash yourself. Get off me.” It was enraging not to be able to scream, to have to protect her from our parents, our parents from her. For the first time I saw my sister as a burden, and understood that I would have to carry her, in some sense, for the rest of my life. I kept punching her, and she made no move to protect herself, and everywhere my fist sank in, its small force was muffled by her flesh.

I kept hissing at her to get off me, although, literally, I was on top of her, kneeling on her thighs, wobbling precariously, and her dirty nightgown was bunched and twisted around her waist, but still she was on me, really, with her bullying musk and her appetites, and I stopped hitting her only when I saw, through the stars of my rage, that she loved it, with her eyes shut and her mouth jagged in a sow’s pink grin. I slapped her hard across the face, drawing a tear from one eye, making no difference, and then leaped away from her, hugging myself with fright.

The only effective weapon against her was indifference. I had always instinctively known that, but had not, until that night, begun to know just how horrible that was. She thrived, she prospered, on any sort of attention, like a plant on light. Even horror, disgust. Even fear. Love, disapproval, clinical interest, curiosity, outrage, hate, cold, and warm—no matter how you regarded her you were already lost, for the mere fact of your regard became her nourishment. To look at Abigail was, is, to feed the beast. To look at her with strong emotion is a kind of suicide.

She drew a bath for herself in the basement tub, so that our parents would not hear. She came back clean and cleanly dressed and got into her own bed. I lay awake until daylight with burning eyes, worrying at my parents’ innocence, my duty to preserve it, my duty to Abigail, my crippled sister, my monster, who slept deep. At one point during the night she rolled up onto her knees and slept the way she had when she was very young, with her face mashed into her pillow and her bare rump in the air. My innocence was gone forever. Hers returned, and always would, settling upon her in the night like dew. My sister manufactures innocence, like adrenalin, or sweat.

 

So I never learned What Happened That Night until last year, when Abigail was at the ACI and I couldn’t raise bail because it took all the money I had to retain a decent lawyer. Frank Calef was a great help to me at that time. Frank’s a banker, probably more responsible than any one other individual for the Wampum Factory Mall, and one of the City Council Yankee Impersonators who stand fast against the Italian Menace. But Yankee impersonators, like their Platonic ideal, have some virtues, the greatest of which is devotion to duty. Frank helped me out with money and made his shoulder discreetly available should I want, in an uncharacteristic (but permissible in the extreme circumstances) moment of weakness, to sag against something. I suppose he was motivated by a notion of solidarity, and if my name had been Squillante or O’Malley or Fishbein (especially Fishbein) he might not have been so willing to stand by me. Although I suspect he would have anyway, but would have missed a beat between hearing the news and offering assistance.

In any event we spent a lot of time together the first few months, drinking coffee in my parlor and talking, like characters in an old soap opera; not the new kind, with all the sex. Frank is a soap opera man, with a regular, handsome, sober face, and a ponderous, stolid tolerance for voluble females. He is sexless, too, like soap opera men. (I am as unlike Abigail as possible, but my instincts have never been in doubt. I share, along with my imprudent sister, and all imprudent sisters, a bawd’s contempt for sexless men.) Needy females made him unctuous. “I know,” he would murmur, nodding. “I know.” Organ music up and out. I remember him as a handsome boy, self-assured, twinkling, clever in a modest way; always bound for Brown and Harvard Law. What I forgot, until he reminded me one evening, was that he was first-string quarterback for Frome High in 1953, their championship year.

I went to one game in my life, when I was twelve. The boys looked robotic and stupid with their padding and their helmets. And the cheerleaders…It seems now, though this can’t be true, that I pitied them even then. I remember how pretty they were, how professionally they filled the space in which they crouched and leaped. It seems to me now that they smiled like airline stewardesses, unexcited, in control; and that in their generous, graceful display of frost-reddened thighs and pure white underpants was an unflinching awareness that this, now, was the high point of their lives and beauty; that all that remained was decline, disappointment, a lifelong footing of the bill. They smiled like the retiring Miss America. They were icons, and in my memory they always knew it. Abigail was no icon; she envied and hated the cheerleaders for their beauty and popularity. But she was happier than they were even then, and her life has had no high point, nor required one, and the only reason she bothered to envy them was her own bottomless greed.

I assumed that Frank was acting out of loyalty to his head librarian. He said, one early evening, that the town owed something to Abigail, and I laughed and said I couldn’t imagine what. Until she married Conrad Lowe she had been an embarrassment and a nuisance, everywhere at once in her mailman’s uniform, an absurd and unflattering outfit that made her look even hippier than she was, with those trousers cut for men, stretched across her buttocks and thighs, the hip pockets gaping wide, and her mailman’s hat set way back on her head, held on with long pins, framing her round wicked face.

And like Cain’s postman she was Fate itself, and when she rang the bell on Saturday the husbands came to the door, and sometimes their wives were out at Food Land, and once in a while, according to Abigail, they were just down the hall in the kitchen, scrubbing the linoleum. She poisoned half the marriages in her territory (and she covered a lot of ground) and a good many outside it, where she was only legend.

I said that if the town owed something to her, it was tar and feathers and a one-way ticket to Worcester. Frank failed to nod and murmur “I know,” but stared into his cold beige coffee and blushed. “I knew her when she was just a kid,” he finally said.

“Everyone did,” I said. “You mustn’t let it make you sentimental. Abigail can take care of herself. She’ll be all right, Frank. I don’t know how yet, but she’s going to get out of this without a scratch.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I was her first lover.” He shivered.

I laughed without knowing I was going to, shocking and hurting him. “Frank, someone was her first lover. Maybe it was you. You ought to know, though, that my sister has always had a love-hate relationship with the truth, and an eccentric sense of humor.”

“I know what I’m talking about. I was there.”

There’s no arguing with people who cite experience. He was becoming agitated, and his face was transformed by genuine emotion, his skin slack and dry, and I could see the skull beneath, the old man’s face.

“I’m going to tell you something, Dorcas, something I’ve never told another living soul.”

Why? “Frank, please don’t. If you’ve never told another living soul, chances are there’s an excellent reason. You’ll just regret it. I regret it already, and you haven’t even done it.”

He closed his eyes. “Dorcas, your sister was…your sister was…when she was fourteen…”

“I know,” I murmured. “I know.”

“…gang-raped by the football team, and I was the first.” He spoke with his eyes closed and held his breath afterwards. I couldn’t speak because he had taken me by surprise. First, I had forgotten he was on the team; and second, I had forgotten That Night, having shoved it viciously so far back in my mind that his saying this acted on me like those phony revelation scenes in psychiatry movies. And third, I had never considered rape, or imagined my sister as a victim. Gang rape.

“We were all out on the ice and drunk as skunks. She had her coat off and she was laughing. We were all so snockered that we weren’t cold at all, although it was below freezing that night, and my fingertips were still numb the next morning. She was laughing and she took off her hat, one of those wool stocking caps, and her hair tumbled down to her shoulders.

“We had just been carousing, you know, whooping it up and full of…well, booze, obviously, but also joy. Real joy. I was never that happy again. And your sister stayed with us, like a mascot. She was fun. It was fun to get her drunk and she was a good audience. She laughed at our jokes. We were easy with her at first. It was like she’d always been with the team. And then, I don’t know, we were horsing around on the ice, and then she was standing there, and we are all standing around her, in a circle, watching.

“She wasn’t afraid then. She was laughing so hard, she lost control. Even when she saw we weren’t laughing anymore she kept it up, forcing it. It was like she loved the sound of it. It was like a song, or a chant. She whirled around and around, looking into our faces, laughing. Not afraid.

“Your sister wasn’t stupid, you know.”

“I know.”

“She wasn’t some bimbo, some retarded girl. We weren’t that bad. Or maybe we were worse. She said, ‘What happens now?’ Her voice wasn’t scared. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t know! She said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ And somebody said, ‘Take off your sweater.’ I said it. And she did. And someone else told her what to take off next, and so on. Every time she took something off she got bigger. She kept smiling and we could hear her breathing. We didn’t look at each other, or move.

“She stood there naked on the ice, under the moon, with just her shoes on, and then she took them off, although nobody told her to. We weren’t that cruel.” Frank laughed, an awful, barking laugh. I don’t often pity people. I pitied Frank. “I think she took them off because she knew they looked wrong. Halloran, lineman, laid down his jacket for her to stand on.

“She danced.

“She didn’t dance like a stripper or a whore. She didn’t move her hips around. She raised up her arms and turned, around and around, with her head thrown back and her legs apart, but not being obscene, just showing us. I have never in my life seen anyone as happy as she was then.

“All the guys threw their jackets down. She thought they were giving her a bigger dance floor. She thought that this was what we wanted. To watch her dance.”

“No,” I said. “Abigail was born knowing everything.”

“You’re wrong about that, Dorcas. I know what you mean, but this time you’re wrong. She may have known the, you know, about the birds and the bees. But she didn’t understand that she couldn’t stop it. She was frightened when I touched her, and when I entered her, I’m sorry, Dorcas, she cried, and I hurt her. She was just a kid. I didn’t hit her. I didn’t need to. She could see how it was. And by the time I was through, she was talking back to me, complaining even, ‘Where you going, Frank? What’s your hurry, Frank?’ I can still hear her voice in my ear. And after me came Lawson, and Siniscalchi, and Halloran—”

“This is not necessary,” I said.

“And she stopped crying, and, I swear, got into it. She wasn’t in shock or anything, I’m sure of it. And finally came the place-kicker. McAdoo. Henry McAdoo. Runty little redheaded guy, died at the Yalu. We were all zipped up again by then, and turned away. We left them on the coats, on the ice, and walked away to wait for McAdoo to finish. We weren’t watching, except when McAdoo started yelling ‘Stop it! Let go of me!’ and we looked over and he was trying to push himself off her and she wouldn’t let him go. He was pushed up on his straight arms and you could tell he was really trying—which was funny-looking, and we started razzing him—because she had both hands on his butt like claws, clamping him on top of her; and anyway, even if his head wanted to go, his dick wanted to stay, I’m sorry, Dorcas. He was still humping away, which is why he looked so funny, like two different men joined at the waist.

“So we couldn’t figure it out, why he was acting like this, and then he started shouting to us for help, really sounding terrified. He was maybe fifty yards out, but you could hear him clearly, Jesus! Jesus! McAdoo was hysterical, and we were razzing him from the shore, and then I heard it, the slow cracking of the ice, like branches snapping, only electrical, and you could just see under the surface blue bolts like lightning shooting out from them in every direction. It was like a meteor was landing in slow motion exactly where they were.

“It looked like they’d both had it. It looked final. I suppose we were…disposed to think along those lines, considering what we’d been doing. Somebody would pay for what we’d done.” He was lost for a moment; disappointed, maybe, about the failure of divine retribution. “McAdoo died within the year.”

“You see a connection?”

“No,” he said immediately, surprising me, “of course not. I tried to imagine a connection at the time. You know.”

“I know.”

“We were yelling across the ice at them to get the hell off. We didn’t have to tell McAdoo. He could hear the ice break. She couldn’t or didn’t care. She was crazy. When she finally let him go—when she was through with him—the ice wasn’t solid anymore, although it still held together. It wobbled like Jell-O, especially around the two of them. We were all frozen on the shore. I kept thinking that any minute I’d get brave and go out there. I was so sure I was going to do it that the shock hit me only much later.” The shock of his own cowardice.

“McAdoo slithered away from her on his stomach, which of course you had to do. He didn’t even get up on his hands and knees. He swam across the ice, and made it. She didn’t move. She stayed on her back, with her arms out and her knees up, and when we yelled at her to move, she laughed. She sounded so strange when she laughed that I was afraid she was going to do something nuts, like stand up and dance, or something worse. She was wild. Somebody had to go out and get her, and every guy there was terrified. Of her. She had the power to ruin us all, literally. She could stay out there and die and we’d go to jail for life, and then to hell. She could take any of us down with her to the bottom of the lake if we tried to rescue her.

“Sippy Siniscalchi was the one who got her back. He crawled out there while I was dithering and dragged her back on the coats, on her back, laughing, while we all watched and couldn’t breathe. When he got her on shore he went crazy and tried to slap her in the face, but we stopped him. He called her names. I remember he said, ‘Get your clothes on! Show some respect!’ But she wouldn’t even do that, and we had to dress her, like a doll.

“She just flopped against us, worse than drunk, while we jammed her back into her underwear and blouse and skirt and sweater. And her shoes! It was a nightmare getting her feet into those shoes. When my kids were little I could never dress them. That same looseness, that way they have of letting you…always brought it back to me. I called her a stupid kid, accused her of being childish. Nothing I said, nothing anybody said, affected her. She was so happy. It’s grotesque, but she was happy.

“I took her home. I dropped her off at your house. We’d all split up without saying a word. When we got to your house, she said, ‘You’re worried that I’m going to tell. I’m never going to tell.’ I believed her, but the awful part was, I hadn’t even thought of that yet, I was so worried about the other thing, the responsibility. The sickening way her ankle wobbled when you jammed her foot into the saddle shoe.

“We owned her now, or she owned us. We could have done anything we wanted with her. I don’t expect you to understand this, but we could have left her to die, or killed her and buried her in the snow. We could have brutalized her, I mean much worse than we did, far worse. She was ours, she was mine, I’m sure every man there felt she was his. It was horrible. See, it has nothing to do with guilt, really. I’m sorry, Dorcas, but no matter what we did, we didn’t rob her of anything. We didn’t take anything away from her.”

“I know, Frank.”

“We did something very bad, but I don’t know even now what it was. See, when I say she was passive, she wasn’t a zombie…she was alive. It was her show. She handed it to you, the responsibility, for her life, for her safety, for her character, her future, her past, she just handed it over.” Frank was crying. “You could see her do it. Your sister is…we let something loose that night, and if it hadn’t been us, it would have been somebody else, but it was us.

“I owe her. She knows it.”

I couldn’t shake the image of Abigail naked on the ice, revolving at the center of a circle of men. I asked Frank if that had really happened, and happened the way he had just described, and he said that it was honest to God true, every bit of it.

I said that if he owed her anything, then or now, it was a bill for services.

He left, offended as hell. Although the next time I saw him he was, of course, solicitous and correct, as ever.

I mentioned him to Abigail the next visiting day. She was tired and slow on the uptake. It took her a while to remember who he was and what he was to her. “He tell you everything?” she asked me. She smiled. “He spilled his guts, didn’t he? What an asshole.” This was unusually hard-edged of her, and I said so.

She was quiet for a minute and then sighed. “I never thought I’d come to this,” she said.

“You didn’t? Really?” I was astonished. “Where did you imagine you were going to end up?” I got up and started to pace. The guard didn’t like that. I had to sit back down. “Did you imagine,” I asked, “that you were going to wind up supporting yourself? Raising your own child? Ministering to the needy? Did you imagine that I, for instance, would have a life of my own? Does it surprise you to find me here every day of the week, and off raising money in your sorry behalf when I’m not here, and generally devoting twenty-four hours to you?”

“Poor kid.” That’s it. Poor Dorcas. “Is there any chance, do you suppose,” she asked, “that Frank would tell that story on the stand? For the defense? For me?”

I said yes, there probably was a good chance, but that it would ruin him. I said I didn’t see the point of asking him to jeopardize his standing and his family life for so little. I asked what causal connection there could possibly be between That Night and the death of Conrad Lowe.

“They’re working on a scenario,” she said. They being Minden & Wayland, and specifically the Old Man, Miles Minden himself. “They call it a ‘hypothesis’ but it’s a scenario, really.”

Too bad. I loved the idea of Miles Minden saying “scenario.” I loved it almost as much as the idea of Miles Minden himself, Son of the American Revolution, thirty-second-degree Mason, defender of insurance companies and banks, Grand Old Gentleman of Weybosset Street: a white-maned, apple-cheeked, baby-soft anti-Semite anti-Catholic racist, who tipped his hat to everyone he met, treating bag ladies as royalty, construction workers as peers, so that a simple lunchtime stroll down the street would turn into a parade, and he would leave his inferiors dazed and grateful and babbling about “breeding,” which, according to Minden, was something he and his family had, and that the rest of the world should refrain from doing. Miles Minden, the twinkling Nazi, he of the “rockbound principles” and the “ironclad convictions,” as the Providence Journal-Bulletin always puts it.

That this lovable, deeply evil old man would allow himself to be personally involved in my sister’s defense just illustrates the extent to which your false Yankee will go in aid of his diminishing kind. (Miles is himself a pale shade of his father, an almost real Yankee, Russell Minden, who served one term in the U.S. Senate. Russell, a truly Grand Old Man, is often cited in modern American history books, having been the only legislator in the twentieth century to introduce a bill disenfranchising the poor. The old man’s love of principle ran even deeper than his love for the Constitution. Also, he was insane. Miles still speaks of him with awe.)

It was Miles Minden’s brilliant idea to have Abigail spend the last few months before trial in the Big House rather than home with me. He achieved this by responding in muted fashion to the prosecution’s half-hearted “flight risk” bail-revocation request. In prison Abigail is bored and restless and complains bitterly about the food, but she trusts Miles. He has established her, in the local and national imagination, as a martyred saint.

“Mr. Minden says—” Abigail closed her eyes and concentrated. “That everything in my life, my reconstructed life, should point to the tragedy. Like an arrow. Like a great big blinking arrow that a four-year-old child couldn’t miss. The jury must be convinced that everything that happened was inevitable. That I never had a chance. That it was always going to happen. The tragedy. If we can get them thinking along those lines, he says, there’s no way in the world they can convict me.” She grinned. “He calls me Little Lady.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “What happened that night, the night of the gang bang, was the first involuntary step on the road to ‘the tragedy’? I don’t get it. Quel non sequitur! I mean, that night on the ice you had quite a time for yourself, as I understand it. Is that the point? You acquired a lifelong taste for debauchery and lawlessness? Well, I’ll drink to that! I can’t see winning a jury over that way, though.”

“Rage,” Abigail said, suppressing a belch. “All these years I’ve been carrying that rage with me, locked up inside.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Don’t blame me. It’s not my idea. Oh, and self-esteem. They destroyed my self-esteem.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” Abigail chewed her thumbnail. “How’s Anna?”

“How does this contribute to the self-defense idea?”

“It doesn’t. We’re partly scrapping that, see? We’re going to say, number one, she killed him to save her life, and, but, number two, she killed him because, I don’t know, hell, everything in her past was one great big flashing arrow—”

“Insanity? Good Lord. How are you going to act like an insane person? That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”

“Uh-uh. Not insanity. Diminished responsibility.” She saw the appalled look on my face. “That’s a real defense. He says it’s our best shot.”

For a second I was derailed by the thought of Minden saying “our best shot.” “That’s an actual defense?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Diminished responsibility.” I started to laugh. “Kid,” I said, “you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Abigail got the joke—we’ve always laughed at the same things—and we became rowdy and the guard made me leave.