Living Out Loud (28 page)

For I know it is the right thing in some times and places. I remember sitting in a shabby clinic far uptown with one of those freshmen, only three months after the Supreme Court had made what we were doing possible, and watching with wonder as the lovely first love she had had with a nice boy unraveled over the space of an hour as they waited for her to be called, degenerated into sniping and silences. I remember a year or two later seeing them pass on campus and not even acknowledge each other because their conjoining had caused them so much pain, and I shuddered to think of them married, with a small psyche in their unready and unwilling hands.

I’ve met fourteen-year-olds who were pregnant and said they could not have abortions because of their religion, and I see in their eyes the shadows of twenty-two-year-olds I’ve talked to who lost their kids to foster care because they hit them or used drugs or simply had no money for food and shelter. I read not long ago about a teenager who said she meant to have an abortion but she spent the money on clothes instead: now she has a baby who turns out to be a lot more trouble than a toy. The people who hand out those execrable little pictures of
dismembered fetuses at abortion clinics seem to forget the extraordinary pain children may endure after they are born when they are unwanted, even hated, or simply tolerated.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former. That is what the fetus is to me, the almost living. These questions began to plague me—and, I’ve discovered, a good many other women—after I became pregnant. But they became even more acute after I had my second child, mainly because he is so different from his brother. On two random nights eighteen months apart the same two people managed to conceive, and on one occasion the tumult within turned itself into a curly-haired brunet with merry black eyes who walked and talked late and loved the whole world, and on another it became a blond with hazel Asian eyes and a pug nose who tried to conquer the world almost as soon as he entered it.

If we were to have an abortion next time for some reason or another, which infinite possibility becomes, not a reality, but a nullity? The girl with the blue eyes? The improbable redhead? The natural athlete? The thinker? My husband, ever at the heart of the matter, put it another way. Knowing he is finding two children somewhat more overwhelming than he expected, I asked if he would want me to have an abortion if I accidentally became pregnant again right away. “And waste a perfectly good human being?” he said.

Coming to this quandary has been difficult for me. In fact, I believe the issue of abortion is difficult for all thoughtful people. I don’t know anyone who has had an abortion who has been casual about it. If there is one thing I find intolerable about most of the so-called right-to-lifers, it is that they try to portray abortion rights as something that feminists thought up on a slow Saturday over a light lunch. That is nonsense. I also know that some people who support abortion rights are most comfortable with a monolithic position because it seems the
strongest front against the smug and sometimes violent opposition.

But I don’t feel all one way about abortion anymore, and I don’t think it serves a just cause to pretend that many of us do. For years I believed that a woman’s right to choose was absolute, but now I wonder. Do I, with a stable home and marriage and sufficient stamina and money, have the freedom to choose abortion because a pregnancy is inconvenient just now? Legally I do have the right; legally I want always to have that right. It is the morality of exercising it under those circumstances that makes me wonder.

Technology has foiled us. The second trimester has become a time of resurrection; a fetus at six months can be one woman’s late abortion, another’s premature, viable child. Photographers now have film of embryos the size of a grape, oddly human, flexing their fingers, sucking their thumbs. Women have amniocentisis to find out whether they are carrying a child with birth defects that they may choose to abort. Before the procedure, they must have a sonogram, one of those fuzzy black-and-white photos like a love song heard through static on the radio, which shows someone is in there.

I have taped on my VCR a public television program in which somehow, inexplicably, a film is shown of a fetus
in utero
scratching its face, seemingly putting up a tiny hand to shield itself from the camera’s eye. It would make a potent weapon in the arsenal of the antiabortionists. I grow sentimental about it as it floats in the salt water, part fish, part human being. It is almost living, but not quite. It has almost turned my heart around, but not quite turned my head.

I
t was a summer night when I heard the running footsteps behind me. I ran, too, and slipped into the hallway of my building, a locked door, a pane of glass insulating me from the outside. The woman was only a few steps behind me. Her face on the other side of the glass was black with mascara mixed with tears. She said someone had tried to rape her, and that she thought he was following close behind.

It occurred to me afterward that everyone should be allowed more than a minute to suddenly discover what sort of person they are. That was all it took for me to play out the possibilities: a gang of thieves who used a seemingly distraught woman as their entrée, an unbalanced street person who would turn on me in the safe confinement of my own home. Or a rape victim.

I opened the door.

She had a cup of tea, refused to call the police, washed her face, apologized, and finally, after an
hour, went home in a cab. I was left with the teacup, the blackened tissues, and an unbearable sense that the rapist had watched her enter and was now lying in wait for me. Each time I thought of the woman, I had a heavy, deep feeling in my chest that I finally recognized as rage—not at her pursuer, but at her.

I hadn’t thought of that night in some ten years until lately, when I have wondered again about the responsibilities of one human being toward others of the species. There are two women that have made me consider this: Cheryl Pierson and Hedda Nussbaum. Both of their cases have made me think of another, too—that of Kitty Genovese.

Miss Pierson went to jail, after she paid a high school classmate to kill her father because, she said, her father would not keep his hands off her, because he sometimes had sexual intercourse with her two and three times a day. Miss Nussbaum went to jail, too, accused with her lover of beating their six-year-old adopted daughter to death. In photographs taken at the time of her arraignment, she looks stunned, but perhaps that is simply a function of her face, the face of an aging prizefighter who has gone back for the TKO many times too many. Clearly, it was not only the little girl who was beaten.

Two horrible secrets. But, of course, people knew. They always do. When Miss Pierson first alleged that her father had molested her, she said that she had been afraid to tell anyone. And then one friend, neighbor, relative after another appeared in court to say that they suspected, that they had watched the man grab his daughter’s body, make dirty comments about it. But nothing was really done until a boy Cheryl Pierson sat next to in homeroom shot Mr. Pierson in the driveway of the Pierson house.

The horror show in Miss Nussbaum’s apartment was an open secret, too. Neighbors heard screams and shouts and the unmistakable sound of something hitting a human being, hard,
even through the thick walls of an old building. Some of them saw bruises on the little girl. The difference between this and the Pierson case was that some of them did something. Some of them sought help from police and social service agencies for the people on the other side of the wall. But nothing really was done until the morning when Hedda Nussbaum and Joel Steinberg were taken into custody, their adopted son taken to a foster home, and their little girl taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced brain dead.

And so to Kitty Genovese, twenty-three years dead. She was a national symbol. She was knifed to death and her neighbors listened and watched and, the modern parable went, did nothing. At the time there were two reactions to the story: that it could not have happened, and that, if it did, it could only have happened in New York City.

But it doesn’t only happen in New York, and it happens all the time. We have a national character that helps it along. The rugged individualists who take care of themselves, the independent men and women who prize the freedom to manage their lives without outside interference: these are the essential Americans. We want a police force that respects the rights of individuals, the same police force that will not take a man into custody, even if his wife’s face looks like chopped meat, if she insists she fell in the bathroom.

But the dark side to independence is isolation, and the dark side to managing your own life a belief that it must be perfectly managed. “Dirty laundry,” we call our problems, and “Don’t trouble trouble,” we say. There are countries in which the answer to “How are you?” is often “Not so good.” Here the answer is almost always “Fine.” There are cultures in which family members get together and tell you what you are doing wrong and how to live your life. I prefer one in which everyone minds their own business—at least until that moment when I am yelling “Help!”

So sometimes the victims feel that it is impossible or unseemly to pass their problems on to another, that in the midst of self-reliance they would be blamed for having pain, or sharing it. Sometimes the bystanders feel that if there was real trouble, the victims would do something about it, that the Cheryl Piersons and the Hedda Nussbaums would call hot lines and find therapists, that when the authorities have been notified there is not much more they can be expected to do. In retrospect, of course, it is never enough. The storm breaks, the man is murdered, the child beaten to death, and people realize that, in some sense, they have been watching it all through their curtains. Life as spectator sport.

That’s why I was so angry that night, when one of the players demanded with her streaked cheeks and her sobs that I come down out of the bleachers and help her out. I was taking care of my own life and I had no interest in being implicated in anyone else’s. How dare a stranger pass on her vulnerability. There was nothing I could do anyway. There was no way I could help. But at least I opened the door. If I had known then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have. I would have gone upstairs and called the police, which seems a sensible, no-risk solution. Except that when I came back down she might not have been there. Perhaps she would have been somewhere with a knife at her throat. On the other hand, I would have made the right decision—for me. And I could always say I tried.