Fatal Vision (13 page)

So I'd hold her hand and talk her through it, and we were doing the breathing—the breathing things. And she was very reassured that I was there, there's no question about that. I'm not just saying that. I really have a—always have felt very strongly that she did trust me implicitly, and the fact that I was there holding her hand was very important to her.

I did leave at one point for about an hour. It was something to do with canceling classes or something like that. I may have had to run over to a chemistry lab to hand in a paper or tell my lab partner that I wasn't going to be there, or something like that, and came right back.

But the doctor arrived shortly thereafter, checked her, and what happened was he examined her a couple of times, and he clearly had a frown on his face after the second or third examination. Then they took X rays and another OB man was there also, and it turned out the baby was too large for Colette's pelvis type, so basically the doctor and I told her together.

We came in together and said, "It's not progressing well, and we think that we're probably gonna have to do a Cesarean section." The doctor and I then had a discussion about whether I would be in the Cesarean section room. I didn't particularly want to, not because I was squeamish, I just—I didn't see any reason to be there. And I always felt that it would sort of impede the doctor. I still believe that to this day, by the way, about other couples when they ask me. But he was not at all in favor of me being in there, so as we mutually discussed it, it became clear that it was clearly better that I wasn't in there.

So I sat outside the operating room in a little, you know, sort of waiting area, and read a
Reader's Digest
and a
Look
magazine, then reread the
Look
magazine and paced a little and had a cup of coffee and, I guess, the usual parent routine, new to me but not new to anyone else.

Finally, you know, he came out from the operating room—it seemed like an eternity, by the way—and said that everyone was fine and that we had a—ah, a girl, and that the baby was happy and healthy and Colette seemed to be doing fine but she was exhausted from the long, sort of nonproductive labor.

I saw the baby, oh, it wasn't immediately. It was more like half an hour, an hour later, and the baby, quite honestly, to me she did not look that pretty. Everyone kept saying what a pretty baby Kimmy was. She was cute, but she wasn't, you know, an elegant-looking baby.

Anyway, she was healthy and appeared happy. And Colette was certainly healthy and seemed to do fine. But she was sort of knocked out from the surgery, and she was very wan in the recovery room but happy that everything came out okay.

Mildred had come to help out at the house, and she and I were hitting it off better at this time than ever before or since. We had a good time. We went to dinner together, I showed her around Princeton a little bit, she met our friends. She was staying at the house, in one of the bedrooms. Didn't, of course, like the house. Felt it was, you know, not clean enough. Felt that it was not nearly up to the standards that her daughter should be kept in. But I handled myself well, you know, through all of this, and she liked that. I was clearly in charge of the family, and it was working out well for Colette.

Anyway, our friends had a nice, joyous reaction. We did the pass-out-the-cigar routine, and all my friends stopped by. Cosmo Iacavazzi, who was the All-American football player, stopped by. He was a good friend at the time. We were in Tiger Inn together.

And his wife, whose name I forget, who was a great cook. She cooked her spaghetti sauce, by the way, with the pork chops and chicken in the sauce and then they scooped out the pork chop and chicken and didn't serve that, and just used sausage and meat balls left in the sauce for the meat. But the flavoring was with the pork chops and chicken, and it was a great spaghetti sauce. It was a true, great real Italian homemade spaghetti sauce, and it would take her a whole day and she made it once a week. And she wasn't even really Italian. Cosmo Iacavazzi's mother had to teach her how to cook that. She always recalled that as one of her traumatic events of getting married to Cosmo.

Anyway, they came over and we had planned this big thing for when Colette came home from the hospital. But she—she was very worn out. She had lost some blood at surgery and it took a little while to get her back on her feet, so she wanted it a little more quiet. Two or three weeks later, though, we had all our friends over and / cooked spaghetti one night. It was a positive time in our lives, and I remember sort of how proud it was to be, you know, a father.

Freddy and Mildred Kassab visited the cemetery every day in March, bringing fresh flowers each time. Other than that, they went nowhere and spoke to no one. No one called; no one visited; letters of sympathy piled up unanswered.

Though neither she nor her husband felt the desire to eat, Mildred suddenly found herself with an inexplicable but irresistible compulsion to bake. She baked pies, cakes, cookies, and bread, at all hours of the day and night. The aroma of her baking filled the air. Soon, the refrigerator was full, then the freezer. Still, she baked, stacking loaves of bread on kitchen counters.

Mildred seldom spoke to her husband; he very seldom spoke to her. There was, they both felt, nothing to say: nothing would ever be worth saying again. Words could neither soothe nor heal, nor undo death, so the Kassabs existed, side by side, in a silent darkness beyond words.

A shipment of clothing arrived from 544 Castle Drive: the contents of Colette's and the children's drawers and closets. Items that had been deemed of no evidentiary importance.

Mildred sat alone in her bedroom, sorting the clothes, suffering new stabs of agony every time she came across a little dress or coat she recognized. Worst of all was handling Colette's nursing bras and maternity girdles. The new baby would have been born in July.

On routine errands, Mildred would see a pregnant woman and start to cry. She would see a bearded, long-haired hippie and feel an almost uncontrollable surge of hate. She could not understand why the killers had not yet been apprehended. Mildred was not a strong woman, physically—only five feet one inch tall and very

thin—but her grief and rage were immense. At Womack Hospital, that first afternoon, she had said to Jeffrey MacDonald: "If I ever found her [the blonde in the floppy hat] I would tear out her eyes and her tongue and turn her loose." Her desire for vengeance was undiminished. It was the only feeling left to her, other than pain.

Eventually, she had to stop her baking. The kitchen could no longer contain what she produced. Yet not a single piece of cake nor slice of bread was ever eaten. She and her husband were utterly without appetite.

At the cemetery, she would whisper to Colette, "Help us . . . help us . . ." Then she and Freddy would return home.

At seventeen, Mildred Kassab had married a man ten years older than she was. His name was Cowles Stevenson and he had owned a luncheonette in downtown Patchogue: an undistinguished, working-class town on the south shore of Long Island, physically quite near but socially worlds removed from such fashionable resort communities as the Hamptons and Amagansett.

Mildred had wanted a baby right away: a girl whom she could dress up in fine and fancy clothes. When she became pregnant she and her husband transformed one room of their small rented house into a nursery. They pasted silver stars on a pale blue ceiling and nursery rhyme characters on peach pastel walls. They painted yellow and white ducks on the floor. In a closet, they hung a little fur coat and a row of tiny, frilly dresses. Mildred decided that if the baby were female she would name it Colette, after its father.

The baby was female, but stillborn. That had been the first Colette.

A second pregnancy resulted in another female infant—the second Colette—also stillborn.

A year later, the third Colette was born. The baby died within weeks, however, following surgery to relieve an intestinal obstruction.

Mildred did have a healthy male child, and then, four years later, on May 10, 1943, she gave birth to the fourth Colette—the one who would live—the one who would marry Jeffrey MacDonald.

One Friday evening in the spring of 1955 Mildred was returning home from having picked up her son at a friend's house. As she opened the door to her garage, the car headlights illuminated the interior and she could see her husband's bathrobe hanging from the rafters. In the same instant, she realized he was in it.

Cowles Stevenson had left no note. He had not seemed depressed. There had been no sudden trauma in their life. Mildred told friends she had no idea what had driven her husband to suicide.

Colette, who was twelve at the time, had been spending the night at a friend's house. Her Aunt Helen had broken the news to her because Mildred could not bring herself to do so. Her father's death was the one thing, in later years, that Colette would never talk about: not to her mother, not to her friends, not to her eventual husband, Jeffrey MacDonald. When she met Freddy Kassab a year later, she told her mother right away that she hoped the two of them would marry, "so that everything can be the way it used to be again." After the marriage, Colette began immediately to refer to Freddy as her father; never did she call him her stepfather, nor would she permit her friends to do so.

Mildred had arrived at.the Princeton Medical Center in April of 1964, the day after Kimberly was born. Colette had been holding the baby at her breast when her mother had walked into the room. Looking up from her bed, Colette had reached out and had handed the infant to Mildred.

"Here, Mom," Colette had said, her eyes moist. "Here is one of your lost little girls."

Now they were lost forever, all of them, and—immersed in her pain and surrounded by late-winter gloom—Mildred Kassab felt that she did not want to lay eyes upon or speak to another human being ever again.

The Kassabs' solitude was interrupted only once: On March 19, when CID agent William Ivory arrived at their home to ask questions about Colette's relationship with Jeffrey MacDonald.

Ivory had been on Long Island for a week, interviewing residents of Patchogue who had known MacDonald since childhood. He had compiled a summary of their comments in a notebook.

—"The best student I ever had," said a former English teacher.,

—"Possibly the finest kid ever to come through the Patchogue High School," said another. "I am still waiting to see his equal."

—"He is absolutely not capable of doing this."

—"He is incapable of any such action."

—"Jeff and Colette got along beautifully. I was especially

impressed by how proud they seemed to be of their kids, with the way Jeffrey exhibited his affection for the babies."

—"The kid I knew could not possibly have been involved in this."

—"The Jeffrey MacDonald I knew would not have done this."

—"Not Jeff. Absolutely, not Jeff."

An agent who accompanied Ivory to Patchogue remarked that MacDonald seemed to be "Li'l Abner with straight-A marks," and even the Fort Bragg provost marshal was prompted to comment that from all outward appearances, "It was as if the all-American girl had married the all-American boy."

Freddy and Mildred Kassab, in their grief and isolation, sang his praises with special fervor.

Colette's mother told Ivory that she had encouraged her daughter's relationship with MacDonald from its inception. She said that there had been no one in Patchogue—no one she had ever met anywhere—who had seemed to her a finer prospective husband for her daughter.

The marriage, though it had come about sooner than it otherwise would have, because of Colette's pregnancy, had been ideal from its first day to its last. The Kassabs told Ivory that they had maintained extremely close contact with Colette and that at no time had she ever seemed less than totally satisfied with her domestic situation.

During their Christmas visit to Fort Bragg, the Kassabs had found the atmosphere to be joyous. And, as late as Sunday afternoon, February 15—only thirty-six hours before her death— Colette had sounded the way she always did: calm, untroubled, content; at peace with herself and her life, and looking forward with great anticipation to the birth of her third child in July. Perhaps, she had told her mother, this would be the son that Jeff had always wanted.

The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald

I think, you know, if there was a low point to the marriage, it was the summer after our year in Princeton. That was a bad summer. We were living at my Mom and Dad's house—I believe we took over my Mom and Dad's bedroom and they moved upstairs—and my sister Judy was there, and my brother Jay was in and out, and it was tight.