Little Bird of Heaven (8 page)

A week or so later when we were taken to Honeystone’s by our mother, on our way home from visiting one of Mommy’s cousins outside East Sparta, Ben was eager for an ice-cream cone but I was not. Instead, I asked for a sundae, in small plastic bowl where you could see what you were eating. Though Zoe Kruller was at the counter, and remembered exactly the kind of ice-cream cone I’d always wanted, winked and called me “Krissie” in the sweetest way, and tried to get me to smile at her, I wouldn’t smile, I was sulky-sullen and not the sweet little Daddy’s girl and I would not lift my eyes to Zoe’s shining face, I would not.

T
WO YEARS
, seven months later on a snow-glaring Sunday morning in February 1983 Zoe Kruller was
found dead
in a brownstone rental on West Ferry Street, downtown Sparta.

On the front page of the Sparta
Journal
it was reported that Zoe Kruller had suffered
blunt force trauma to the head
as well as
manual strangulation
and so it was a case of
foul play, homicide.

It was revealed that the murdered woman had been
separated from her husband, no longer living with her family.
It was revealed that the murdered woman had been
discovered in her bed, by—

“Krista. Give that to me.”

“No! I’m reading this.”

“I
said
—”

She snatched the pages from me. Such agitation in her face, I surrendered the pages to prevent their being torn.

Such agitation in her face, I turned away frightened. But I’d seen—

At this time, I was eleven years old. No longer a small child to be protected from what my mother called “ugly”—“nasty”—“disgusting” things. No longer a small child to tolerate such protection and so somehow I knew—I came to know—that the glamorous freckled friendly woman who’d waited on us at Honeystone’s was this very woman who’d
been
found strangled in her bed
by her own son; I came to know, with a thrill of horror, and of fascination, that at the time of her death Zoe Kruller had not been living with her family, as other wives and mothers lived with their families; at the time of her death Zoe Kruller had been
separated from, estranged from
her husband Delray Kruller and her son Aaron who was in my brother Ben’s class at the middle school:
separated from, estranged from, broken off communication with.
Such delicious facts I came to know, that caused a sensation of numbness to pump through me, as if I were wading into a dream; a dream that resembled the Novocain injected into my tender gums, when I went to the dentist; a dream that left me short of breath, dazed and strangely aroused, headachey; a dream of the most intense yearning, and the most intense revulsion. For to these facts were added, in what was invariably an altered tone of voice, like the shifting of a radio station on the verge of dissolving into static, the fact that Zoe Kruller was
sharing quarters with another woman, at 349 West Ferry.

Sharing quarters with a woman! Not living with her husband and son but with a woman! And the woman’s name too seemed exotic:
DeLucca.

West Ferry Street was miles away from Huron Pike Road. West Ferry Street was not a street familiar to me. I thought it might be near the railroad yard. Off Depot Street, a block or two before the bridge. At the edge of the warehouse district, the waterfront. That part of Sparta. There were taverns there, late-night diners and restaurants. There was XXX-Rated Adult Books & Videos. There were rubble-strewn vacant lots, and there was a raw-looking windswept stretch along the river advertising itself as Sparta Renaissance Park where “high-rise condominiums” were being built.

And somehow too I knew that men came to visit Zoe Kruller in that brownstone,
male visitors.

These
male visitors
were to be
interviewed by Sparta police.

Why these facts so agitated my mother, I had no idea. Why my
mother slammed and locked the door against me, against both Ben and me, refusing to answer our frightened queries—
Mom? Mommy? What’s wrong?
—I had no idea.

It was a very cold February. There were joke-cartoons in the local paper about the Ice Age returning. Comical drawings of glaciers, mastodons and woolly mammoths with curving ice-encrusted tusks. I was in sixth grade at Harpwell Elementary and my brother Ben was in ninth grade at Sparta Middle School which was also Aaron Kruller’s school. When my mother asked Ben if he knew Aaron Kruller quickly Ben said no: “He’s a year behind me at school.”

Adding, with a look of disdain: “He’s part-Indian, Kruller. He doesn’t like people like us.”

“He’s your age, isn’t he, Ben? In the paper it says ‘fourteen.’”

Irritably Ben said, “What’s that got to do with it, Mom? I told you, he’s a year behind me. I don’t know him.”

“But he isn’t from the reservation, is he? He isn’t a full-blooded Indian, is he? ‘Delray Kruller’—he isn’t an Indian.”

“Jesus, Mom! What difference does it make? What are we talking about?” Ben was becoming frantic, furious. This doggedness in our mother—this persistence, in the most trivial details—had a way of upsetting Ben even more than it upset me.

Let it go, Mom. Please let it go
would be my silent plea.

Still our mother persisted: “That poor boy. That’s who I feel sorry for, in all this. Just a child, to discover—
her.
” Even now, our mother could not bring herself to utter the name
Zoe Kruller,
only just
her
in a tone of disgust.

Ben turned away with a shrug. He hadn’t looked at me at all.

Of course, Ben knew Aaron Kruller. He’d known Aaron Kruller since grade school.

But it was like Ben, not to talk about things that upset him. The fact that Zoe Kruller had died, that someone we’d known had died, seemed to embarrass him. My brother was of an age when, if you couldn’t shrug
and make a wisecrack about something, you turned away with a pained smirk.

To me he said, out of the corner of his mouth, “Kruller’s mom—that ‘Zoe’—know what she was? A slut.”

Slut?
I felt the word sharp and cracking like a slap across my silly-girl face.

“A
slut
is a female that
fucks.
Aaron Kruller’s mom was a
slut,
and a
junkie,
too. That was why she left the dairy. That was why she left off singing. And Aaron didn’t go running out to ‘summon help’—they found him with her, where she was dead, and”—Ben’s voice lowered even further, creased and cracked with hilarity—“he’d shit his pants.
That
news you won’t find in the paper.”

In the paper—in the succession of newspapers that would come into my hands—some of them hidden from us by our mother, in a drawer of her cedar bureau, others shared with me by my girlfriends at school—I would see Zoe Kruller’s smiling face gazing up at me, on the verge of winking at me
Krissie! What can I do you for today?

That riddle to which there was no answer.

As she’d turn to Daddy lifting her fevered glamour-face like a flower taunting you to pick it
Mis-ter Diehl! And what can I do you for—today?

The most commonly printed photograph of Zoe Kruller—which in time would find its way into state-wide newspapers though never into national publications nor syndicated by the Associated Press, so far as I knew—was the one in which Zoe posed with fellow musicians from Black River Breakdown, in her spangled low-cut girl-singer attire, and with her hair crimped and springy and electric-looking cascading over one semi-bare shoulder. Another more casual photo showed a younger Zoe smiling at the camera at a sly angle as if she’d been teasing the photographer, with the exuberant ease of a high school cheerleader or prom queen. How many times these and other likenesses of
Zoe Kruller, Sparta murder victim
would be reprinted, how many times I would stare at them in wonderment that I had ever known her—that of course I knew her,
still—never in my life would Krista Diehl not-know Zoe Kruller from Honeystone’s—and each time it seemed to me a wrongful thing, a nightmare-thing, a cruel taunting joke that in these photographs Zoe had been smiling with such trust, never imagining that, one day, her picture would be printed—reprinted—in newspapers—shown on local TV news—with the identification
Zoe Kruller, Sparta Murder Victim.

Though I was young for eleven, young in the ways of the (adult, even the adolescent) world yet the admonition came to me
She should not have been smiling like that.

The early headlines were enormous banner heads running the width of the Sparta
Journal.

SPARTA WOMAN, 34, FOUND BEATEN, STRANGLED

Death of Local Bluegrass Singer Investigated by Police

Focus on “Men Friends”—“Visitors”

Later, headlines would diminish, and their tone would subtly alter in tone:

In our household, no one spoke of Zoe Kruller. It was a time—I guess it wasn’t the first time—when Daddy was often working late, or had to stay away overnight “on business”—and Mommy was edgy and impatient with Ben and me if we asked about him—“He’s
away.
He’s
working.
How do I know where he is, ask him yourself!”

Which was so illogical, even Ben couldn’t think how to reply.

The phone, which had not often rung, rang often now. And Mom, who hadn’t often used the phone, was using it often now. At a distance from us, upstairs in the big bedroom into which we were not welcome except by invitation—when I helped my mother houseclean and vacuum,
for instance—or in the kitchen with the door so oddly, unnaturally closed—the maple wood cedar door which Daddy had installed in the kitchen was
never closed.

Except now, sometimes it was. When Ben and I returned from school on the school bus and tramped into the mudroom at the rear with our snow-wetted boots, there was the kitchen door closed over, and we could hear our mother speaking on the phone in her low urgent accusing panicky voice that was a warning to us, not to approach her
But what—? What will—happen? What does this mean? Will there be an—arrest? How can there be an arrest, if—A lawyer? Why would he need a lawyer? Oh God a lawyer—we can’t afford a—

Ben was stony-faced, kicking off his boots and stomping away upstairs loud enough so that Mom might hear. Ben ignored my entreaties as he ignored my stricken look, my wounded thumb shoved to my mouth so that I could gnaw at the nail and cause the cuticle to bleed a little more.

What does he say, you know what he says! Well he won’t talk to me—maybe he’ll talk to you—But no lawyer, that’s—No that’s crazy—

This excited voice of my mother’s—this tone of reproach, bewilderment, humiliation, anger—suggested that she was speaking with her older brother, or with one of her sisters. I didn’t want to hear!—quickly I pressed my hands over my ears and stomped upstairs after my brother.

Well, say! Thought it was you.

What can I do you for, Krissie?

Tried to make myself cry staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and speaking in Zoe Kruller’s throaty-scratchy voice but I didn’t cry, not one tear.

D
ADDY,
we could not ask.

Not Krista, not Ben. Not our mother.

Not about Mrs. Kruller-whose-picture-was-in-the-paper. Not about the
homicide.

There were no words for me to speak of such a thing to my father. As at any age I could not have spoken frankly to him about the physical life, or about sex; I would never have dared ask my father how much money he made, how much our house had cost, if he was insured and how much was he insured for. I could not have asked him about God:
Is there a God, and what has God to do with us?
These were taboo subjects, though the word
taboo
did not exist in our vocabulary and if it ever came to be known in Sparta, by way of advertisements and popular culture, it would be the perfume Taboo.

In any case children did not ask about death. Children could watch death on TV, gunfire, explosions, planes shot wantonly from the sky to fall in a filigree of flame, but children could not ask about death. Only very young children who would quickly learn their mistake.

When Grandpa Diehl had died, and I was four years old and too little for school. When Daddy wasn’t at work he’d kept to himself in the basement of our house in his workshop where we would hear his power tools wailing through the floorboards and in the days, weeks following Grandpa’s funeral Daddy did not speak to us about Grandpa Diehl except evasively to say that Grandpa had “gone away.” By the look in Daddy’s
face, my brother and I had known not to ask where Grandpa Diehl had gone.

Mom had warned us: don’t ask Daddy about Grandpa, Daddy is
upset.
On the phone Mom said
Eddy’s taking it pretty hard. You know how he is, it’s all inside.

The words struck me:
It’s all inside.

Taking it pretty hard. All inside.

At school, people were talking about Zoe Kruller, who was Aaron Kruller’s mother, or had been Aaron Kruller’s mother. Now Mrs. Kruller too had
gone away.

How strange it seemed to us, who’d known Zoe Kruller from both Honeystone’s Dairy and from the Chautauqua Park music-nights, that a woman so friendly, so pretty and glamorous would be
strangled in her bed, murdered.
How wrong it seemed to us that you could be the girl-singer for Black River Breakdown and applauded and whistled at and made to sing encores, yet someone could still hate you enough to
beat, strangle
you in your bed.

Some worse things were done to Aaron’s mother than just killing her, know why?—’cause she was a slut.

We were made to come home immediately from school. Our mothers would not allow us to stay for after-school activities nor did school authorities encourage such activities, in the months following Zoe Kruller’s death. Patrol cars swung by the schools, cruising through the parking lots like friendly sharks. Bus drivers counted heads before shutting the bus doors and leaving the school property, determining that we were all
present and accounted for.
The older boys objected, they weren’t
damn girls.

Ben said: “Some things I heard, about Aaron’s mother, it was just her he was after, the ‘strangler.’ He wouldn’t be after any of
us.
”

I asked Ben who’d told him this. I asked Ben what else he’d heard at his school and Ben shrugged evasively and said just some things—“Not for you to know.”

In Sparta—unlike the rest of the world where people were dying and being killed in terrible ways all the time—it seemed rare that anyone died
and yet more rare that anyone died in a way to cause such upset, dread, wonder. Of course the “natural” deaths were sad and people cried, especially women. Women were adept at crying, as men were humbled and stymied by crying. Women were cleansed by crying, as men were smudged and stained by crying. But the person who’d died was usually elderly, or had died
after a long illness,
or both; or had died in a car crash on the highway, or a
boating accident
on the river or one of the numerous lakes surrounding Sparta. These were sad deaths but not frightening deaths. Because you knew, if you were a child, that nothing like those deaths would ever happen to you.

Except now, people were frightened. Adults were frightened. There is such a profound difference between
dying
and
being killed.

At Honeystone’s Dairy it wasn’t so much fun any longer. Without Zoe Kruller leaning on her elbows on the counter, smiling.

The ice cream was still delicious, greedily we devoured it.

The smell of the fresh-brewed coffee was pungent, disagreeable. To my sensitive nostrils, disagreeable. Since my ice-cream cone infested with nasty weevils Daddy hadn’t taken Ben and me back to the dairy all summer, I had to wonder if there was some connection.

At Honeystone’s I hadn’t much wanted to overhear my mother speaking with old grumpy-grandma Mrs. Honeystone. The two shaking their heads in disapproval, bonded in that moment by a swell of indignation like dirty water swishing about their ankles.
And leaving her family, too! How could she.

The mysteries you live with, as a child. Never solved, never resolved. Utterly trivial, petty. Like a tiny pebble in your shoe, that causes you to walk crookedly.

Z
OE
K
RULLER.
Zoe Kruller. Zoe Kruller.

Now in late February and early March of 1983 the white clapboard house on the Huron Pike Road quivered with this name, unspoken. In the household upstairs and down and in my father’s workshop in the basement
in which he spent much of the truncated time he now spent at home there was the taut tense silence that follows a lightning-flash when you wait for the thunder to roar in.

Across Lake Ontario, great armadas of winter-storm clouds. Blown eastward and south out of Canada, the air too bitter-cold for snow. The silence-before-the-storm where you wait not knowing what you are waiting for.

In their bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall—the door shut tight, only a meager band of light beneath—our parents spoke together in their low urgent alarmed voices. For hours.

We sank into sleep, Ben and me, to the sound of those voices. We were wakened from sleep, to the sound of those voices. I think this was how it was. I am trying not to mis-remember, and most of all I am trying not to invent.

Zoe Kruller. How could you! How many times! Oh why.

Those hours, middle-of-the-night. Those vibrations in the air as when the old furnace clicked on, heaving itself into life like an enlarged and failing heart.

Or maybe: my parents’ bedroom door opening, and my father’s footsteps in the hall, on the stairs to the first floor. So I was wakened dry-mouthed and frightened.

“Daddy? Where are you going?”

Calling down the stairs to him, and he’d tell me to get back to bed, back to sleep. And if I followed him to the stairs, and halfway down the stairs he’d speak more sharply to me: “Go back to sleep, Krista. This is not for you.”

E
ARLIER THAT WINTER, WHAT
we hadn’t wanted to remember. What would be blurred and smudged in our memories—Ben’s, and mine—like a blackboard across which a fist has been dragged, carelessly.

Later we would realize that these were the days
before.

Days, nights
before
Zoe Kruller’s death.

After Thanksgiving, through the long siege of Christmas and through snow-dazzled January those days we had no idea were
before.

Those days when Daddy seemed to be away much of the time. He’d been hours late for Thanksgiving dinner—“dinner” was at 4:00 P.M.—at my aunt Sharon’s house and he had not shown up at all for a birthday dinner at another relative’s house. Weekdays he’d call home to say he’d be late for supper or maybe he wouldn’t be having supper with us at all. And those nights when he didn’t call home. And when he didn’t come home.

And Ben and I persisted
Where’s Daddy?
though seeing in our mother’s hurt and furious eyes
Don’t ask! Shut up and go away
but of course we asked, we could not stop ourselves from asking. No one so pitiless as children sensing something wrong, smelling blood and eager for someone to blame.

Where Daddy was:
at work.
Or,
meeting with a customer.
Or,
at the construction site.

I worried that Daddy wouldn’t have any supper, Daddy would be hungry. Where would Daddy eat?

Ben said not to worry, there’s plenty of taverns between here and wherever Daddy might be. And Daddy knew them all.

Our mother said: “Your father is taking on more work. ‘Managerial’ work. Paul Cassano”—(our father’s employer at Sparta Construction)—“is semi-retired, you know he’d had a minor heart attack last winter. So your father has more responsibilities.”

Still I set Daddy’s place at the table. Dark green “woven” plastic place mats, paper napkins neatly folded and fork, knife, spoon positioned properly.

And I helped Mom prepare dinner. When I’d been a little girl, this was such a special time! Being entrusted with stirring macaroni as it boiled in a pot on the stove, cleaning carrots and potatoes at the sink, regulating the Mixmaster at its various magical speeds—not too fast, so that mashed potatoes or frosting splattered out of the bowl; setting the oven, usually at 375° F, for casseroles and cakes. What I liked was, at such times, nudging against my mother’s warm fleshy thighs, as if accidentally
in our small kitchen. My mother had a crisp biscuity smell unlike the harsher perfume-smell of some of the mothers of my classmates, who lived in Sparta and in whose homes I sometimes stayed overnight, as my mother dressed more casually than these mothers did—in Kmart stretch slacks, pullover shirts and sweaters, wool socks (in cold weather), sneakers. For
just at home
my mother never wore makeup but before Daddy returned from work, late afternoons on weekdays, she took care to put on lipstick—the same shade of Revlon pink-frosted-plum she’d been wearing since high school—and to fluff out her flattened hair, pinch at her sallow cheeks.

It was a time when my mother boasted of my father, to anyone who came into our house: “These maple wood cupboards, this counter and floor—all this Eddy did by himself. Isn’t it beautiful?”

And: “Eddy put in the deck by himself. That built-in grill—Eddy did that. Saved us thousands of dollars he says. Isn’t it beautiful?”

No longer did my mother speak of my father in this way, when
the trouble
began. Rarely did my mother speak of my father at all except in blunt flat statements of fact
Your father won’t be back tonight, don’t set a place for him.

During the lengthy, confused and unsettling Christmas season—how endless it seemed, being “recessed” from the safe, secure routines of school—the serious arguments began. These were eruptions of words not strictly confined to my parents’ bedroom and therefore particularly alarming to Ben and me as the sight of, for instance, our parents’ unclothed bodies would have been to us. Or, these were voices rising through furnace vents and into my room, from the kitchen; sometimes, late at night, from the living room where, a single lamp burning, TV turned low, my mother would be awaiting my father on the sofa, alone, like a sick woman curled up beneath an afghan.

Those nights when Mom insisted upon my going to bed by 9:30 P.M. and Ben by 10:30 P.M. but did not come upstairs to bed herself. Instead she was waiting for headlights to turn into our lane, from the river road. She was smoking—though Lucille Diehl
did not smoke
—and she might have
been drinking—though Lucille Diehl certainly
did not drink
. She seemed to be watching television but no channel engaged her interest for long not even the Classic Movie Channel, and the sound was
muted.
Several times Ben came downstairs barefoot in his T-shirt and boxer shorts—Ben emulated Daddy, in nightwear—to say how “weird” she was getting, for God’s sake why didn’t she go to bed!

Mom ignored Ben. Smoking in the darkened living room with just the TV screen glimmering and glowing like something phosphorescent at the bottom of the sea, a simulacrum of life that was not life. The acrid smell of her cigarette smoke wafted upstairs to my bedroom, I dreamt that the house was on fire, my legs were tangled in bedclothes and I could not escape.

Sometimes sensing my mother’s mounting desperation—unless it was my own—I would sit at the top of the stairs. In pajamas, barefoot and shivering. It was midnight: so late. And then it was 1 A.M., 2:35 A.M., alarmingly late. I was waiting with Mommy, in secret.

To see Mommy in the living room, on the sofa with her back to me, I had to slide down two or three stair steps. I had to be very quiet, hugging my knees. For if Mommy knew that I was there she would have been very angry.
Can’t I have any privacy in this God-damned house for God’s sake! Go away and leave me alone you God-damned kids, having babies was the end of me, lost my figure, lost my looks, God damn you go away, just leave me alone.

This was not our daytime mother, I understood. This was Mommy-at-night in the darkened living room and with the TV set turned to
mute.
And sometimes I would fall asleep on the stairs, and one of them—it might be Mommy, it might be Daddy—would discover me, and not be angry with me, but half-carry me back to my bed and tuck me into my bed and so it was part of my dream, and a happy part of my dream, or maybe it had not happened, at all.

Krissie you naughty girl! Shut your eyes tight and sleep.