Fatal Vision (12 page)

Later, MacDonald would recall that trip:

"We drove down in my white Chevy, the white '65 Chevy convertible with the black top. It was a really nice car; it wasn't souped up or anything, it was a handsome convertible for the time. I'm sure I did the driving, because that would be my normal personality, and I can see us driving along this two-lane highway. It seemed to run indefinitely. It was almost an extraordinarily long four-hour drive.

"We talked aimlessly about things, not seriously ever about Colette, Kim, Krissy, or that night. We talked about other things, about Jay. I believe I knew at this time that Jay was having problems. I don't think I was aware of the depth of his problems. I knew there was something going on up north."

In early March, however, the air was chilly, the sky dark, and many of the better motels and restaurants not yet open.

"We stayed at a motel which I would rate as one star out of four stars—possibly a half star instead of one. The rooms were drafty and it was a cold weekend on the beach. It was gray, overcast, windy—like forty-five to fifty degrees, which was perfect for my mood. It was just how I felt. It was as though the cumulonimbus that were scudding across the skies were a reflection of me, rather than a clear sky that would draw me out of this depression we were in.

"We found the food to be sort of unpleasant. I don't remember anything that we ate, but I remember that we were displeased with (A) the accommodations and (B) the food. We had a couple of crummy meals. The town was almost shut down because it was the off season.

"We did walk on the beach, though.
I
remember my mother was frustrated and anxious because things were not turning out like she hoped. She had hoped it would be warm and sunny.
I
think she sensed what I've always known about myself, and what later years proved to be correct: that I
do
recover with the sun. I need the sun. Basking in the sun rejuvenates me physically and emotionally. A long, sunny weekend is the best possible cure for me. But that was not to be.

"My mother was trying to give me space, and yet she wanted the weekend at least to have something nice to try to lighten the load, so therefore she was frustrated and anxious, and I was the one who had to turn and say to her, 'Relax, that's okay. We'll just—we'll walk on the beach anyway.' So we did.

"But actually, walking on the beach was not a good thing for me at that time. It was a melancholy thing. I'm not a beach walker. I'm a much more active person than that. So I was walking along the surf remembering both my father and my family and trying to forget the recent tragedy, and I had to keep turning from my mother so as to not let her see me cry, which is my way, right or wrong."

As MacDonald's mother recalled it: "The time that was spent at the shore was very quiet. We would have a quiet breakfast, go to bed early, rest, and so forth. He complained of a headache and I'd give him an aspirin, you know, just to reduce it. We picked up shells, and he just walked. He walked for hours along the beach. I did not question him. I never probed. I could not ask questions. I felt that other people had. I was the mother of a young man whose wife and children had been murdered and my concern was to give solace and to try and help him bear this agonizing burden. When he wept, I was trying to tell him that it was really rough and I understood and that we would just have to go on from that point. And sometimes he would weep, and he would say, 'I loved them so much, Mom. You know I loved them so much.' "

Back at Fort Bragg, on March 6, Jeffrey MacDonald wrote a letter to the Kassabs.

Dear Fred and Mildred—

Apparently it was not just a bad dream—the magnitude of our loss is something I'm still trying to comprehend.

I know this won't help you in your grief but I want you to know that I loved Colette more than anything in the world. I know she was happy as long as we were together, and I will never be the same person without her.

Although my family is gone, it helps me just a little to remember that Colette and Kim and Kristy and I had as much happiness in our short years together as most families have in a lifetime. Colette truly loved you both and would want you to remember the happier times.

Love, Jeff

The Voice of Jeffrey
M
acD
onald

The year at Princeton was incredibly great. I was in absolute love with Colette and I thought having Kimberly was neat and we had tons of people over to the house. We had just moved into a house on Bank Street, right off Nassau Street, across from the university, and we had some great times: the big dinner that Colette and I learned to cook for all our friends, mainly spaghetti, but we had some others and our house became as I knew my house in Patchogue, where my parents were the entertainers of everyone. Colette and I had sort of taken over this role at Princeton. We were the hit of the campus, so to speak.

Of course, that was the year that Bill Bradley became a big star and the next year he went on to superstardom, but we were good friends with Cosmo Iacavazzi, who was the All-American football player at Princeton at the time, and I remember he used to come over to eat and we had a blast together.

I was so proud of Princeton, and being a member of Tiger Inn, the eating club. It wasn't Ivy or Cottage, which were the rich boys' clubs, but it was, you know, one of the top five for sure, and it was
the
jock club—Cosmo Iacavazzi was a member—and Colette was proud of me being in there.

We had some difficult times. I remember there was a football weekend and we had invited my parents and we had tickets for the game and everything, but my father was always an enigma—you never really could figure out what was gonna happen next. He was very ambivalent about a lot

of things. He was proud of me being at Princeton but he was also upset a little bit that it was maybe too snooty a place—in other words, it was too pseudo-intellectual, and it was perhaps a little bit left-leaning, and more importantly it wasn't the working people, it was the phonies of the world that were going there.

My father was essentially an unschooled person. He was extremely bright, a voracious reader, an intellectual at heart but one who tried to hide his intellectual—both capabilities and desires—under a barrel. He would have liked the world to have believed that he was rough and tough and non-intellectual, in fact a laborer, and he would occasionally make what sounded like racist comments, either about racism or other religious groups like Presbyterians or Methodists or whatever.

He was raised by his great-grandmother in Gardner, Massachusetts. His own mother had gotten married at fifteen, just like
her
mother had done, and just like
her
mother had had to leave
her
behind to go off and find a way to earn a living, she had had to do the same thing when her husband left her. She moved to New York when my father was very young, leaving him with this great-grandmother who spoke French and who was, apparently, a very tough woman and very dominating.

He became an electrical designer. He had gone to technical school, and essentially he was a draftsman. He worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and even though he never finalized his engineering degree, he never really forgave the intellectually elite community for not recognizing him as an engineer. He always resented that he was being paid less to do full engineer's work, just because he was a designer and did not have a degree.

There's no question that he was the leader and ruler of our family. His presence—it's almost beyond comprehension how important he was to the family. His presence was huge, wherever he was and in whatever setting he was in. He was a very magnetic person, not a shy person, a lot of charm and grace, always a gentleman and chivalrous—he treated women in a chivalrous fashion which now, of course, would be considered chauvinistic—but his hold on the family, even to this day, is staggering.

My Dad
was
the family, and that's the truth. He was a phenomenal person with an incredible presence. I think no matter how strong my Mom got—and this is a little unfair but it's simply a fact from my viewpoint—no matter how strong my Mom is and was, my Dad was still the main mug. He was a dominating force in all of our lives. There's no question that he was the most important force in my brother's and sister's psyches—my brother, incidentally, was clearly favored by my father, simply because he was firstborn— and, I suspect, also in mine.

He was not a peaceful man by any means. He terrified us when he was angry, and a mere look, or the
thought
of him being angry would completely silence us and stop any problem. Also, he constantly railed against the domination by women that he saw in the world, and his background, of course, is very consistent with that. Never to his dying day did he forgive the women of this world for attempting to rule and take over, and many was the time—especially when he'd had a little too much to drink—I heard him say that a domineering woman was the most dangerous creature on God's earth.

In keeping with that, he was not a warm, loving father. He was a little distant, especially physically. My father was super-masculine and he never really touched us or hugged us or kissed us, because that was unmanly. He could never express his love for us. We all knew it was there, but we never heard it spoken and never felt a physical embrace.

What he demanded most were two things: absolute obedience, and achievement. In my family, any indication that you couldn't keep up or couldn't be superior in every field—or try harder and overcome whatever adversity it was—was a sign of weakness.

And what I remember
most
clearly about him, I suppose, were the trips we would take on Sundays to visit my grandmother—his mother—in Malverne, where she had finally wound up living. It was a harrowing experience to go forty-five miles along the old 1950s back roads between Patchogue and Malverne with an impatient, angry father driving the car, bitching constantly about the inadequacies of every other driver on the road.

He was always very tense and angry on these trips, and he was extremely vituperative toward other drivers. His frequent expression was he wished he had a Sherman tank, or he wished he was driving a big cement truck and he could just squash the other cars.

But anyway, at Princeton, we had this big weekend all set up, and one of the highlights of these weekends was bringing your parents to the club for dinner. And I remember that my father was already sick and was having difficulty walking long distances, and the day was a trial for him because we had done so much and walked so much and we had to walk from the club at lunchtime to go down to Palmer Stadium, which was a pretty good walk for him, being short of breath, and then walk back and have dinner.

And I'll never forget how incensed he got that we had black waiters in little white, short jackets serving us in the club. He became furious, and as a matter of fact we got into an argument at the club over that, the particulars of which elude me, but I was embarrassed about his anger.

The black help and the short white jackets were uncomfortable to him at best, and snobby and pseudo-intellectual and effete at worst, and we had a little, sort of, scene that day together, and I'm kind of sorry, of course, that it occurred. We didn't have that much time together from then on, and I remember with some sadness that this occurred.

From time to time I brought Colette to the club, the Tiger Inn, and, um, she was funny, she was a little ambivalent. She didn't like the idea of clubs at Princeton because they seemed a little, um, white-glovish, too much like something Mildred would like, but she also kind of enjoyed the status, and also the fact that the Tiger Inn was considered a really good club—one of the top five for sure, and it was
the
jock club—and she was proud of me being in there. We went over and had lunch and dinner many times, especially on football weekends, and she was kind of proud of that. And, um, there were no other relationships going on at all during this year. There was—I wasn't seeing anyone or doing anything. I was coming home. You know, we had a good year.

Kimmy's birth was, of course, traumatic, no question about it. Colette, you know, does not—did not—like pain. We had joked for a long time about natural childbirth and she had even made a little pretense at beginning classes for natural childbirth but she was advised not to by her physician and advised not to by me. I knew Colette very well and I felt that as soon as the first pain came the plans for natural childbirth would go out the window. And indeed they did.

Colette is a feminine, gentle person. She was not a sturdy frontier woman. She, you know—she was very motherly. Especially later on, with two kids, she was an incredibly good mother. But at this point, you know, she was reasonably frail.

Like, for instance, she's left-handed, you know, and so she was—she had this funny-looking shot on the basketball court, and she could dribble only intermittently well, sometimes with both hands. But very feminine and pretty and it's distressing to see her with the hair, you know, a little scraggly, and sweating and grunting and complaining about the pain.