The Women's Room (77 page)

Val poured herself a Scotch, asking Chris if she wanted one, but Chris laughed. ‘I didn’t get raped today,’ she said.

Val sat on the bed. ‘There are some things I want to ask you. Did the hospital give you a sedative? Did they do anything for your hysteria?’

They had not.

‘Did they give you a syphilis test, a gonorrhea test?’

No.

‘Did the police offer you any protection if they were unable to pick this guy up?’

No.

Val leaned back. Chris was anxious. She leaned toward her mother. They were lying on the bed together, and Chris curled up in her mother’s arms.

‘Is that bad, Mommy?’

‘It’s okay,’ Val said, but her voice was hard. ‘I mean, we can have the tests done when we get back to Cambridge. It’ll be all right.’ She
patted her child. ‘Chris,’ she began in a different tone, ‘did you try to fight back?’

Chris’s head jerked up, her eyes wide. ‘No! Do you think I should have?’

‘I don’t know. What do you think might have happened if you had pushed him aside and stalked past him, and screamed?’

Chris pondered. ‘I don’t know.’ She thought for a long time. ‘I was too scared,’ she said finally, and Val said, ‘Of course,’ and hugged her. But later, Chris said thoughtfully, ‘You know, Mommy, there was something else I was feeling. Do you remember that time I was walking down Mass Ave and that man, that middle-aged man drove up and stopped and called me? And I just walked right to him, off the sidewalk. And he asked if I’d ever done any modeling, and I said no, but I was flattered, and he said if I’d get in the car he’d give me his card and I could come to his office, he had a modeling agency, and I did it, I got right in his car, even though you’d told me a thousand times when I was a kid never to do that, I did it just as if I was in a trance, like I had to do it because he said so, as if the minute he spoke to me, I had no will of my own. Remember, we talked about that? And that was okay, because I came to at some point, and got out of the car before he was able to go too far – you said thank heavens for the traffic jams on Mass Ave. Remember?’

Val nodded. ‘You were about fourteen.’

‘Yes. Well, there was something like that in this. Like us sitting there when Tad was so ugly. Like it would have been a crime for us to do anything about it, to throw him out or call the cops. I mean, nobody else says it’s a crime, but we would have felt it was. We would have felt terrible, like we hadn’t done what we felt was right to do.’

‘In that case, I think we were right.’

‘Yes. You felt you had to suffer it. But why did
I
feel I had to? You know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, there was that kind of feeling about it. Almost as if he had the right to do what he did. As if, once he’d attacked me, there wasn’t anything I
could
do. You know, like in the movies, or on TV. The women never do anything, never. They cry and they shrink and they wait for a man to help them. Or if they do try something, it never works, and the guy catches them and then it’s worse. I’m not saying I was thinking about that at the time. Just that that was how I felt. As if there was literally nothing I could do. I was helpless. And wiped out.
He had the power to wipe me out. Oh, that wasn’t all of it. He said he had a knife, and I was scared enough to believe him. But I didn’t have any courage, Mommy.’ She sat up when she said this, as if she had discovered something important. ‘I’ve always felt courageous. You know. I’d always argue with my teachers. But I didn’t have any courage that night.’

Val put her arm around her and talked for a long time, and Chris settled down in her mother’s love, and her mother talked about conditioning and courage and common sense. She told Chris she had done the most sensible thing possible under the circumstances.

‘I kept thinking he’d stab my face,’ Chris said. ‘I wasn’t worried about the rest of me.’

They spent the next days working hard, packing up Chris’s belongings and cleaning the apartment. Chris still clung to Val on the streets, and although there were two beds in their room, Chris slept with her mother each night. Val took over and supervised the work, and in fact, did most of it herself. Chris felt there was something wrong with Val. She felt that Val was tensed, as if some terrible thing were going to happen. Val sounded and acted calm enough. Still Chris kept running to make her cups of tea or coffee, to bring her little cheese pieces and crackers on a plate. She was alert to every expression on her mother’s face, and often went over and put her arm around her. ‘As if she were protecting me from something,’ she told me. ‘As if she already knew she would have to.’

And when they were walking on the streets, Val’s eyes were darting everywhere. Sometimes, cars stopped right in the middle of the street, and men would call out to Chris, ‘Hey, baby!’ Chris was beautiful. She clung to her mother, almost hiding inside her, hoping they would all go away. For of course, she was used to it, it had been happening to her since she was thirteen. She had never known what to do: she would walk on and ignore them. When she had asked her mother, Val had said, ‘Tell them to go fuck themselves.’ Chris had been shocked. ‘You wanna screw, baby?’ some man would say, passing her, and she would look away. Now, clinging to her mother, she saw it. It was rape, rape, rape, and she saw that Val saw it that way too. She practiced fighting back. Go fuck yourself, she said over and over in her mind. Val actually said it out loud one night when they were walking back from the restaurant. They had their arms wound together, and they passed two youngish men on the sidewalk.

‘Hey, girls,’ one said.

Wanna have a good time? We can show you a real good time.’

‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Chris’s mother said, and swept by, holding Chris’s arm.

Chris giggled all the way back to the hotel, but there was a little hysteria in her laugh.

The morning for court arrived. They had to take a bus. They passed through sections of Chicago Chris did not know. She looked out, but she also looked at Val’s face. She was somehow worried about Val’s face. Outside the bus, there were apartments built of yellow brick. Each one had a concrete courtyard, and around that, a high cyclone fence. They must have been built for black people because inside the yards there were black people, tens and tens of them, just standing there looking out. Chris saw Val’s face and looked again. She felt it too. A wave of hatred came out from all those faces and washed over the bus, a laser beam of hatred that would wipe out all it encountered, bus, street, cars, all.

‘Daley knows how to keep the niggers down,’ Val muttered bitterly. ‘He really does. Build them a bunch of prisons and pretend they’re free to leave them, and stick them all in there and give them welfare. Anyone who’s ever read a fairy tale knows that when you have a dragon and you lock him in a dungeon, he gets out and ravishes the country. I guess Daley never read a fairy tale.’

Chris shuddered. ‘Do you think they hate us, Mommy?’

‘I can’t imagine why not. I would if I were they. Wouldn’t you?’

Chris shuddered again and was silent.

‘What is it?’

‘The boy … the one who raped me … Mick … he was black.’

‘Was he? So is Bart.’

Chris relaxed. ‘That’s true.’

When Val and Chris entered the police station, every head turned. The men’s eyes took in Val appraisingly, but lingered long over Chris. Val tightened, and Chris clung more tightly to her mother. Val was staring. Chris followed her eyes. She was looking at the men’s hips. Their hips and asses were broad and ugly in the shapeless police trousers, and each of them had, hanging around his hips, a gunbelt with a holster and a gun hanging down. They walked swaggeringly, their pants sagging with the weight of the weapon. Like a pair of balls and a prick. They didn’t care how ugly they looked, as long as the weight and size of their weapon was visible. Val’s mouth was twisted.

They finally found the courtroom. But once inside, Chris kept
making noises in her throat. ‘He’s there,’ she would gasp, staring at the back of a head, then look around and, ‘No, he’s there!’ She kept it up for some time, then Val said, ‘I’m going to leave you for a moment. I’m just going to the front of the room.’ She got up and talked to the man standing in front of the room, then called Chris and led her into another room. It was a locker room, long and narrow, with lockers along both walls, and benches in the middle. There were several large windows looking out on a pleasant, leafy street. They could hear dogs barking, a lot of dogs, too many for a neighborhood. They sat there smoking. After a half hour, Chris curled up on a bench and fell asleep. Policemen would occasionally walk through, glancing at them suspiciously. Val decided the men’s room must be at one end of the locker room.

After three hours, two men in ordinary dress entered briskly and approached them. They glanced at them briefly, then one said to Val, pointing to Chris, ‘Is she the one?’

‘The one what?’ Val flared, but they ignored her. Chris sat up. She looked very young, more like fifteen than eighteen, her face soft and pink from her nap, her eyes wide. The men sat down. Both carried clipboards with papers on them, both had pens. They tossed questions at her at random, and barely waited for her to answer. Val watched with horror. Chris was immobilized. She answered their questions mildly, in a small voice without explanation. She did not insist when they argued with her. They attacked and jabbed and tried to get her to retract her story. She did not seem to realize how they were treating her. She blinked and answered, and kept answering. She changed nothing, but she did not get angry, she did not fight back. They were bullying her now. ‘You don’t really expect us to believe that, do you? You sat out there with him for an hour!’ ‘He says you’re his friend. He had your name. Come on, girl, tell the truth!’

Val understood that they were trying to see if Chris would hold up as a witness, but she also knew that their behavior went beyond what was necessary in a case like this. The boy was only a boy, not a millionaire’s son with lawyers staking reputations and high fees on their ability to get him off. They would ask Chris a question, interrupt her while she was in the middle of answering it, then before she could utter two or three words of answer for the new one, hurl a third question at her. Chris was calm, sickeningly calm. She did not seem to see them, although she was looking at them. She would start to answer a question; when they interrupted her she stopped politely, listened, thought for a moment, then answered the next; when they interrupted that, she simply stopped
speaking and looked at them, her face impassive, her manner submissive and obedient. They had not once called her by name. There had not been any suggestion that she might possess one. When she stopped speaking, they started on again with the same questions asked before. She looked at them like a robot built into the body of a sweet child, and began again to answer, her voice calm, emotionless, her answers were the same, her eyes unblinking.

After fifteen or so minutes of this, one of them turned swiftly to Val. ‘You the mother?’

She glared at him. ‘And just who are you?’

He paused for a moment, looking at her as if she were mad. He spat some words at her and turned back to Chris.

‘Just a minute,’ she commanded, pulling a small book out of her purse. ‘Repeat your name and position.’

The man looked at her incredulously. He repeated his name – Fetor; his position – assistant state’s attorney.

‘And bully. I am writing it down,’ Val said.

Both men stared at her. They whispered to each other. Then they rose and left. Chris sank back down on the bench and fell asleep. Val watched the men. The attorney was young, in his early thirties, she guessed, and would have been attractive if his manner were not so ugly. Near the door they stopped and conferred again. The attorney strode back toward Val and looked at her with a face full of loathing.

‘Look, lady, you know what that kid is saying? He’s saying she’s his little friend, see? She wanted it just as much as he did. You may find it shocking,’ he sneered at her, ‘but lots of pretty little white princesses want to try a little black meat.’ He closed the file he was carrying and left the room, followed by the other man.

Val walked to the window. The dogs were barking, barking. The noise seemed to be coming from the building they were in, from the basement perhaps. There must be a dog pound in the building. She stood there, smoking. She thought about that attorney. She wondered if he was the same way when he went home. Did he look at his children and wife as if they were criminals? Did he carry on interrogations over creamed chicken? Val knew she was losing her grip. She was slipping over and there was no way she could stop. She did not want to stop, because stopping would have meant telling herself a lot of lies, would have meant denying the truth she saw staring out at her, all around her, from every corner.

Several hours passed. Val and Chris were hungry, but did not know if
they could leave to find a place to eat. The smoke of their cigarettes blew evilly in their stomachs. Finally, another man entered, also in ordinary clothes. He had the same brisk walk as the other, the walk of one who feels he has power in his little world. He was dark and slender and came up to Val, who was still standing beside the window. He was more polite than the other.

‘Are you the mother of the rape case?’

‘The rape case, as you call it, is my daughter, Christine Truax. Who are you?’ She pulled out her little book again.

He gave his name and she wrote it down: Karman, assistant state’s attorney.

He began to ask her questions, the same questions the first one had asked, but more politely. She said, ‘The other one, beast-man, already asked all that.’

The lawyer explained that he had to ask again.

‘Well, why ask me? Ask Chris. She’s the one it happened to.’

They walked over toward her. She looked tiny and fragile sitting alone on the bench, her thin body huddled up, her long hair hanging around a face that seemed permanently startled. The lawyer started again, but he was more polite than the other. He did not call Chris by name, but he seemed almost sympathetic.