aceldama: site or scene of violence or bloodshed
For example: “Aceldamas, especially for women, are all around us whether we see and recognize them or not.”
In 1898 John Roll McLean, a wealthy businessman who owned the Washington Post, commissioned John Russell Pope to design a grand Georgian Revival summer home in DC. Later, an 18-hole golf course, cast-iron swimming pool, tennis courts, stables, Italian gardens, and fountains were added, along with an iron fence surrounding the complex. After McLean died, his son, Edward, inherited it. However, Edward and his wife blew through their inheritance on one thing or another, including the pear-shaped “Star of the East” diamond and the supposedly cursed Hope Diamond. In 1942 the federal government bought the property to build housing for defense workers during World War II. After the war the Hartford Insurance Company bought it to be used as rental property.1
Which is where I enter the picture, albeit a few decades later. . . .
. . . when McLean Gardens, as it’s now called, is transformed into a women’s residence complex. I rent a room here one summer between college semesters while working as a Capitol Hill intern. It’s located at 3600 Wisconsin Avenue, but if you drive by today (circa 2015), the entrance is on Porter Street, where you’ll see elegant condominiums. In short, it has gone upscale since my summer when tastefully shabby rooms are rented to people holding on to one of the bottom rungs of the rickety limited-opportunities-for-women ladder.
After work I exit the bus and enter the complex through the iron gate—keeping all us single women in—and the unpredictable world out. My tiny first-floor room contains one twin bed and a dresser with an attached miniature bathroom. It smells like the 1950s, redolent of talcum, solitude, and scented hankies. No men allowed inside the rooms. Ever.
I wash city grit from my face. Then I stroll along the sidewalk to the cafeteria, passing trimmed lawns edged with delicate flowers. I’m one of the few women (well, girls) in a miniskirt and love beads. I eat fried chicken, potato salad, and apple pie with chocolate ice cream. The cafeteria reminds me of Howard Johnson’s, my favorite place to eat: Formica counters, waitresses in aqua uniforms, and jaunty white caps of perfection.
That summer I meet Clark, the grandson of the senator for whom I work. After flirting for about ten days, he returns as planned to his home state of Alaska. We correspond, his letters arriving in my small mailbox. I’m drawn to the distance of the relationship, the cleanliness of emotion expressed on paper—no wrinkled, damp sheets. I enjoy the longing more than I would have enjoyed the consummation. I happily read the letters before refolding them, sliding them back in their neat envelopes. I sit in my room and write Dear Clark, filling sheets of paper awash in the slow, safe vibrations of McLean Gardens.
Years earlier, the night I see Psycho, my family and I, on vacation, stay in a guesthouse in New England across the street from a cemetery. (I wouldn’t dare make this up.) That night, of all nights, my parents opt for an out-of-the-way-off-the-beaten-track place. They say it will be a more interesting experience for my sister and me. Never mind that I hate interesting experiences in terms of lodging. I long for the spick-and-span-ness of my beloved Howard Johnson’s, where no motherfucker with a knife as big as a sledgehammer will suddenly plunge through a white shower curtain, stabbing, stabbing, as black-gray blood swirls down the drain of a black-and-white movie. Which, you pray, will never be a biopic of your own life.
Ironically, that first time I see Psycho, I don’t get it. I’m too young to understand the Freudian overtones: that Tony Perkins’s character, Norman Bates, subsumes or is subsumed by his mother, etc. It isn’t until I see it again years later that I realize mother and son are one and the same, and we should all be on the lookout for psychotic breaks. Beware lonely alienated men obsessed with their mothers who live in the middle of nowhere, who need therapy, to say the least or, better, a life. So they won’t take your life prematurely.
But back then the point of the movie to me, the takeaway message, is that you don’t (do not) venture off the beaten track when it comes to lodging.
That night in the guesthouse across from the cemetery, however, nothing happens. At least nothing happens outside of my overactive imagination. In my imagination, I wait. I’m on high-alert lookout for Janet Leigh to pull up in her car, fleeing, but driving straight toward that demented gleam in Tony Perkins’s glassy irises, lighting the way to her doom.
The phone rings one evening in my room in McLean Gardens. My mother, crying, says that my Aunt Sylvia, my father’s sister, was raped and murdered.
I prop open the door to my room. Even though muggy summer drenches the evening, I think the air will cool me, will help me breathe.
My aunt is, or was, married, with three daughters. She lives, or lived, in a beautiful house in the Chicago suburbs, where she owns, or owned, her own successful antiques shop.
I imagine her in her store, that late afternoon. I see her dusting Victorian chairs and Tiffany lamps after her last customer leaves. She hums to herself, pleased by how much merchandise she sold. She counts the money in the cash register and fills out the bank deposit slip. She thinks about what to fix for dinner for her husband and three daughters.
Does she first, simply, sense the man, like a suffocating breath on the nape of her neck? When does she glance at the rear door where goods are delivered? Does she hear that door whisper open? Surely she smiles at the man since she knows him. He is one of the men who delivers antiques to her shop.
But her smile fades when she remembers no delivery is expected today . . . when she sees him unbuckling his belt . . . when she notices the knife in his hand.
Later that summer, asleep in my first-floor room, I awake to snip, snip by my window (which, trust me, is still a better sound than slash, slash). My eyes open. I stare up at a gray-white ceiling. My sheet is kicked to the foot of the bed. A sheen of sweat covers my skin in this un-air-conditioned room. Do I hear his breath just outside the screen, his body pressed against bushes, his heavy soles planted in dirt?
Do I turn on the light? Do I call out? Do I scream?
As strange as it seems now, I don’t remember. All I know is that nothing further happens.
In the morning I stand outside my room with a security guard staring at the cut section of screen.
“Could it be someone you know?” the guard asks. “Someone you met, even casually?”
The night before, I danced and drank a few underage screwdrivers at the Tomfoolery. I met a man. From Germany. My mother, who came of age during World War II, who experienced antisemitism firsthand in America, always warned me to stay away from Germans, which, of course, I ignored. He escorted me home. I don’t even remember his name. I mean, I never heard his name correctly in the first place since it sounded, well, German.
I shake my head at the guard. “No,” I say. “There’s no one.”
That summer I am too young to see the women of McLean Gardens as anything other than widows, spinsters, aunties. Secretaries hoping for a husband and children, a comfortable home in the suburbs, or at least a promotion. Or as grannies patting dry lips with white napkins after finishing rice pudding, a dessert that leaves no one with gastrointestinal distress.
I am too inexperienced to see that the single women of McLean Gardens know something I don’t. They understand how much the odds are weighted against them. Against us. In exchange for safety they are willing to accept an isolation that sometimes bleeds into loneliness, which is not as good as solitude, but better than being lonely alone. After all, John Roll McLean originally named his palatial estate “Friendship.”
I wish for these women to be variations of Janet Leigh. Women who take what they deserve but, unlike Janet Leigh, get away with it. Women who stash the stolen money in the trunk of the car, hit the highway, but do not die.
After the security guard uselessly examines the cut window screen, I return to my room. I close the door, this heavy, humid Sunday. I lie on top of the bedspread. I stare at blank walls, almost white, almost gray. Traffic drones just beyond the gates. The sludgy afternoon stagnates. I hate Sundays. I’ve always hated them. For believers, Christians, it’s a day to meditate, to give praise, to consider the promise of eternal life in heaven. But I’m neither Christian nor a believer. For me, Sunday is not a day that makes me consider salvation or love, but a day that turns my thoughts towards things like the darkness under boardwalks.
Immobilized, I remain on my bed. I hum Eleanor Rigby, a song recently released. It’s such a perfect song for this place that I wonder what lonely people hummed before it existed. For that matter, where did lonely women live before McLean Gardens existed? Where will the women go once the property becomes gentrified?
I don’t stay much longer. If I had, that Sunday-and-Eleanor Rigby loneliness might have become chronic, might have come after me with its knives. But only lyrical, metaphorical ones. Better to be attacked by those than by real knives—always dangerously nearby.