Denial (9 page)

“What books did he read?” I ask, slightly repulsed by my own curiosity, an impulse that Detective Remas, apparently, does not share.

“I couldn't tell you what they were, the books he read. I was looking for razor blades hidden in his books, not at the titles.

“I remember the day we got called to the house when he had hung himself. He had taped some poetry on the closet door. He had a thing about poetry.”

Detective Remas is visibly upset. Something about the death of Brian Beat troubles him deeply. Is this the reason he didn't return my calls?

“His mother. She had a routine. He knew that she was going to his father's grave that day. He knew her routine…. He usually made a pot of coffee for his mother, left it there for her to drink when she woke up. But that morning there was no coffee. This cold son of a bitch hung himself right where he knew she would have to run into his dead body as she went to her car. She told me, ‘I was going to the cemetery to lay flowers out. He
knew that I was going that morning.' I'm the one who had to cut him down.”

So Remas had to cut him down. That is why this topic is upsetting to him. Or one of the reasons.

Detective Remas hands me some photographs that he took at Brian's mother's house on the day Brian hung himself. There were poems, and a picture of the game called Hangman.

The first poem appears to have been typed on an old typewriter. The letters are uneven.

A second poem looks as if it was torn from a book:

I find an almost identical poem on a Web site maintained by a person aiming to inspire writers, and on another Web site that offers prayers.

Can I stand the feeling of feeling sorry for my perpetrator?

 

Later, Brian Beat became a suspect in the abduction and murder of a girl who lived near his parents.

I had never heard of this case; it's the sort of story I would avoid in the papers. Too awful. I look her up and find a picture of her online.

I see a picture of a blond girl. The words
aggressively innocent
come to my mind. At first I feel her look is challenging, as if she is daring us to notice her smooth skin, flushed cheeks, half-open rosebud mouth. I sense that she may have just come into awareness of the power she might have over men. I can imagine that mouth forced open, and I hope that unlike me, she had the presence of mind to bite very hard. The teeth look strong. She was an athlete. The lips are red, suffused with energy. I notice now that the mood in her face is divided. If we look only at the mouth and chin, we could be looking at a grown woman. But her eyes have
a calm innocence. A provocative innocence, but innocent nonetheless. There are two glints of light in each eye. The light above her pupil is the light of her soul, I think to myself, absurdly. The one below suggests a tear, as if she were crying out to me to help her, to help little girls trapped in women's bodies. Her skin is silken, suffused with a red flush, the look of a fairy-tale princess, Snow White perhaps. Her pupils are strangely wide, given the light in her eye.

Is this what I looked like back then, aggressively innocent?

A
s I said, I have always been a spy. I started with my own family. Our family life was defined by mystery, and I was determined to pierce what lay beneath the mystifying miasma. I have learned, again and again, that behavior that seems cruel on its surface might actually be motivated by forces other than malevolence or selfishness. Behavior that seems kind might actually be cruel. I had an urgent need to understand people's hidden motivations, as if it were a matter of safety. As if the viability of my family were at stake.

Discovering that my father was waiting behind the door when gun-wielding Nazis were threatening his mother made my father's decisions easier to understand. When I asked my father whether he thought that it was possible that his mother was raped behind that closed door, he said, “She had washer-woman knees. No one could possibly think of her as a sexual object. Be
sides,” he explained, “she would have told my sisters, and they would have told me.” I am not so sure. Maybe someone needed to ask her. Someone needed to want to know, to be able to bear the answer.

I discovered early on, long before talking to terrorists, that some secrets are relatively easy to pierce. Few people seem to realize that often, all you have to do is ask. You need to pose a question and then sit silently, your whole being focused on the speaker and her story. If you are genuinely curious about people's inner lives, you will learn amazing things, stories better than Tolstoy's. You must watch for movements on the periphery of your vision, thoughts on the periphery of your mind. If you watch closely and listen attentively, secrets will be divulged—whether purposefully or inadvertently. You have to be deeply curious for this to work, of course. I am blessed, or cursed, with curiosity, and as a result I have learned a great deal.

For example, I learned, simply by asking my grandmother, that my grandfather was a roué. This knowledge came about as a result of a picture I found in my grandfather's desk. I don't know why my attention was drawn by the picture. I had no preconceptions. “Who is this?” I asked my grandmother, pointing to a lady with very pale skin and dark hair. I was naive, open to whatever story my grandmother might have to impart. “Oh, that. She was your grandfather's girlfriend during the war,” my grandmother replied, with little emotion, as if I had asked her about an unfamiliar hat. I was puzzled. Didn't she love my grandfather? Why wasn't she bothered by my grandfather's affair, or by his retaining a photograph of his lover? My grandfather was a “dirty old man,” the words we used, when I was a girl, for an old man who seemed inordinately and inappropriately fascinated by sex. He told dirty jokes. He talked about women's bodies. He said “Ooh lah lah” in response to clothing he found attractive, even clothing worn by his own granddaughter. But an affair? This was hard
to believe. When I was a girl, I thought adultery was something you read about in books, not something that occurred in your own family.

“He thought he was madly in love with her,” my grandmother continued. Do I remember this correctly—this “thought he was in love?” He was so in love with her, my grandmother explained, that he considered remaining in England after the war, leaving my grandmother and my then twelve-year-old mother behind to fend for themselves.

I think now of my grandmother's face, her eyes so soft and brown and full of love that you could rest your soul there, and almost feel safe. My grandmother was astonishingly beautiful. She believed in taking care of herself. Going to her house was like going to a spa. She would urge us to use her luxurious creams, her Vitabath, her jewelry, her makeup—always the finest that could be had. Her mink coat always smelled of Joy perfume. She had a large collection of Ferragamo shoes. How could this have happened to her? How could my grandfather, who clearly loved her, have betrayed her in this way?

Still, my grandmother spoke calmly. Wasn't she worried about raising my mother, her beloved Shola, on her own? I kept this information in the files of my mind, unbelievable as it was, to explore further at a later date. I knew that my grandfather adored my dead mother. There were pictures of our mother all over our grandparents' house, unlike my father's house. Many of these photographs were taken by my grandfather. He was a talented photographer. He even won a contest, my grandmother said. Some of his photographs were published in the newspaper. The house had become almost a shrine to our dead mother.

The unburdening of this secret about my grandfather's love affair led, inevitably, to the revelation of others. There was my grandfather's nurse, Anita, who sat in the entryway to greet my grandfather's patients when they arrived at the doctor's office
he maintained in a separate section of our grandparents' home. She performed many duties for my grandfather: receptionist, nurse, bookkeeper. Like my grandfather's wartime lover, she had jet black hair and white skin, and looked remarkably like a painting that hung above the stairway leading to our bedrooms.

My grandfather, as we knew him, was not a loud man. He was sometimes ornery but usually quite reserved, even taciturn. Every day, at precisely noon, he would wander to the back side of the house, where family activities took place, and sit down to a formal lunch with whoever happened to be home that day—my grandmother, the occasional relative or friend, and, during the period when my mother was ill and dying and for the year after her death, my sister and me. But occasionally, after the patients had left the office, just before lunch, or at the end of my grandfather's workday, just before dinner, we would hear shouts from behind my grandfather's office doors. My grandfather and Anita fought in a way that my grandparents never did. “He fights with Anita so he doesn't have to fight with me,” my grandmother told us. Later she added that my grandfather and Anita were lovers.

Anita, like my grandparents' loyal maid, Jean, was a seemingly permanent part of my grandparents' household. She served as my grandfather's nurse from the earliest period I can recall to the end of his medical career, by which time I was in my late twenties. But my grandmother told me that there had been predecessors to Anita, some of whom fulfilled a similar role.

I loved my grandfather fiercely. He was harder to love than my grandmother, and he needed a champion. I loved him in spite of—or perhaps because of—the many aspects of his personality that were hard to bear or defend. He was a male chauvinist, or so it seemed to me. He leered at girls. He was also a racist. I wanted to show him that I was at least as smart as he was, even
though I was a girl. And I found ways to torture him for his racism, as did my mother, I would later find out.

Here is what I loved about my grandfather. He was bright, known for his uncanny ability to diagnose difficult cases. I was proud of this. He was serious and suspicious and terribly judgmental (though not, apparently, of himself). You had to earn his love and respect. This was very much in contrast to my grandmother, who seemed to love everyone, and whose love, therefore, seemed cheap. My grandmother once informed me that I, the more serious, dark-haired and dark-eyed older grandchild, “belonged” to my grandfather; while my sister, the more cheerful, light-haired and light-eyed younger grandchild, “belonged” to my grandmother. I wasn't sure what to make of her statement.

When I was twelve or thirteen, my grandfather suddenly decided that my nipples were dry. I am not sure how he managed to see my nipples, or how he reached this surprising conclusion. He sent me to a doctor, a close friend of his. The doctor prescribed a regime that involved washing my nipples with alcohol, followed by the administration of Vaseline. This supposedly curative regime was imparted not directly to me but via my grandfather, who spoke with the other doctor by telephone. There was something unnerving about the look on my grandfather's face when he spoke to his friend—a kind of conspiratorial look. At the time, I wondered if this doctor had been involved in diagnosing my mother's cancer. Now I think it might have had something to do with my grandfather's sense of ownership over my breasts. I cannot remember what happened after this breast-healing plan was imparted to me. But in any case, the system of which grandparent owned which grandchild eventually broke down, I'm not sure why, and my grandmother and I became very close.

After my grandfather died, I questioned my grandmother further about my grandfather's lovers. It seems there were many of
them. “Weren't you jealous?” I asked her. “No,” she said. She knew that my grandfather loved her, she said. And that was that.

I found her equanimity in the face of this insult impossible to fathom.

Something made me ask her whether she had ever taken a lover. “Yes,” she said breezily, as if I had asked her whether she had ever tasted one of Zaro's glazed doughnuts. Zaro was one of my grandmother's “friends,” their relationship solidified by his willingness to donate money to my grandmother's favorite liberal causes. My grandmother's whole life was politics. She served, for a time, as the chairperson of the Democratic Party in Westchester County. My grandmother was a do-gooder, but never sanctimonious, and people seemed happy to be charmed into helping her. She loved to serve Zaro's bagels and breads at political functions and fund-raisers.

“During the war,” she told me, “a man fell in love with me. He wanted to marry me. He wanted to adopt your mother,” she said.

I was stunned. Too stunned to respond, unusual for me.

“He painted that picture over there,” she said, pointing to the familiar painting hanging over the dining room table. That picture, which had been there as long as I could remember, was now alive with new possibilities, a totem from an alternate life, in which my mother would have been raised by a man who was not my grandfather. It is a picture of a lone woman, standing next to a chair by a yellow-gray sea, staring at the horizon. The picture hangs in my sister's dining room now.

“That was a portrait of me, waiting for your grandfather to return,” she told me. I had never thought to ask who was portrayed in that painting, which I assumed was a copy of a forgotten masterwork, like so many of the paintings in our grandparents' house.

Why would this man, this painter, want to adopt my mother?
My mother already had a father. Her father was still very much alive at the time, even if far away, treating soldiers who were wounded in the war. Did he intuit that my mother needed protection?

I pressed for more details. He was a psychiatrist, it turned out, not a professional painter. My grandmother met him at one of the community meetings she regularly attended.

“Did you love him?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said. He satisfied a need at the time, apparently, rather like Zaro, the owner of the bakery.

“Did you feel guilty?” I asked my grandmother.

“No,” she said, apparently surprised by my question, as if she had never heard that betraying one's spouse is generally considered to be a moral failing. For my grandmother, a parking ticket always meant a call to the city manager, who would “take care” of it for her; a long line at the post office meant sweet-talking her way to the front. This was the biggest puzzle of all—my grandmother's apparent freedom from both anger and guilt. She seemed—is it possible?—to lack a conscience. It was as if she lived in a bubble where the normal rules about fairness and integrity did not apply—either to herself or to those she loved. In my grandmother's world, love was all. This was her way of coping with what life offered her. Although she answered all the questions I knew how to ask, I was never satisfied that I understood her, plagued as I am by shame and guilt, even for crimes I have only contemplated.

But somehow I understood that this was the end of the conversation, that my grandmother had revealed all that she ever would on this topic.

Some secrets, however, required greater effort to pierce than simply asking questions.

There was the mystery of my mother's life as well as her death, which was difficult to unravel by posing questions because I was
afraid to bring the topic up. Fortunately, sometimes people offered information, apparently intuiting that I might like to know. My father was not one of them.

I was told by my grandparents, who idealized their dead child and who could not be relied on as objective witnesses, that my mother was remarkably brave. Other relatives spoke about her liveliness, quick-wittedness, and rebelliousness. She was politically aware from a young age, apparently following in my grandmother's footsteps. One of my mother's acts of rebellion was to attend her 1947 high school prom with a black man as her date. And now I wonder: Who was that man? Was she in love with him? Where is he now?

My grandmother, who was involved in civil rights, insisted that my grandfather treat black people, whom he otherwise might not have included in his practice. She also talked him into treating poor people without charge. The poor people, in those days, were a mix of immigrants and blacks. Although my grandfather was riddled by prejudices, he would often soften when confronted by another person's physical pain. But I could not stand his prejudices. Like my mother, but before I knew her history, I made a point of bringing a black boyfriend by to meet my grandfather.

My mother wanted to become a labor organizer. She had finished high school at age sixteen. She applied to the Cornell School of Labor Management but was rejected on account of her youth. Her second choice was Duke, so she started college there. At the time girls were forbidden to walk on a certain path at night, out of fear that the “niggers” would get them. But my mother organized a candlelit march on that very path. Soon after that, she was expelled. My grandmother told us that she then wrote to Cornell to explain what happened, and Cornell accepted her. My parents were both students at Cornell when they met.

My grandfather's character was quite different from his
daughter's. He was fretful and fearful. He worried constantly about my mother's various childhood illnesses, as he would, later, about my sister's and mine. Because his office was in the house, it was easy for him to treat family members at any time of day. He was fascinated by the power of antibiotics. My sister and I have gray teeth as a result of his frequent medical interventions. He was an excellent diagnostician, or so it was said. But he was so clumsy that his lancing of an infected toe or a blister could result in a deep wound. There is an indentation on the top of my right big toe. Probably I was born with it. But for some reason, I have an idea that my grandfather accidentally gouged me there; that he had meant to remove a wart or perhaps even cut my nails, but instead removed part of my toe. To this day, when I feel alarmed for any reason, I hide my feet under my body.