Wallflower (24 page)

That's what I wrote about, and the grip of little Millie's hand in mine, and the swelling up I felt inside, the warmth of my pride in people knowing I was your daughter. I wrote, too, about how, late that night back home, you came into my room to tuck me in and how you smelled, the faint scent of perfume on your skin, the remnants of powder on your cheeks, and the glow on you still, the glow that comes from being applauded, and the aliveness of you, the pulsing energy, the power I felt when you reached down and grasped me in your arms. I wrote about how I fell asleep remem
bering the applause, listening to it echo, and how, just before I slept, I whispered four words to myself. I think you know them, Mama. "A star is born" is what I whispered. And I wrote how I smiled then and fell asleep and how I thought that was the happiest, proudest, most sublime night of my entire life, Mama, and I wrote about it that way, too, trying to capture the special quality of its magic.

A week later I was positively thrilled when Miss Parce announced she was going to read my story out loud in class. Except she had barely read a couple of paragraphs when I realized what she was trying to do. She read it in this mean, sarcastic way, and soon, sure enough, she had the other girls tittering, smirking, glancing at one another, and rolling eyes. And then, caught up in the spirit of the thing, she broadened her satiric attack, making funny little faces while relentlessly decimating my story, assassinating my every line, until finally all my words lay shattered and broken on the floor.

When she was finished, when there was nothing left of what I wrote except the sporadic tittering in the back of the room, she looked straight at me, eyes glowing, and said: "Tell us one thing please, Beverly: Is there a single line in this entire tale in which there resides one tiny particle of truth?"

I stared back at her uncomprehending, too stupefied to reply. The classroom went silent. You could hear a pin drop, as they say.

"Well,
dear?"
she asked, and, when I still didn't answer: "What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?"

She stared cold stone hard at me, her black pupils tightened down to points. And then she smirked. I wanted to speak. I wanted to cry out, beg her to stop staring at me. But I couldn't; I was too humiliated. And still, the mean old witch would not relent. She kept staring, and then her mouth turned cruel, and she dabbed her tongue to her lips like a snake readying to strike and said: "I've heard your mother actually does sing in nightclubs. Is that correct, my dear?"

I must have nodded faintly, for she went on.

"Well, I must say that is a
unique
occupation for a mother. And I'm sure she does very well at it, too. But Beverly"—and here her voice turned false-friendly—"there are things we write about when the assignment is 'describe a sublime moment in your life' and there are things we don't write about, we don't even mention in polite conversation. I would have hoped you understood that."

With that the old witch wrote a great big
F
in red ink across the front page of my story, then daintily placed it facedown on her desk.

The girls in back had gone quiet again. And at just that moment (and she could have timed it so perfectly only by design) the bell rang to announce the end of class. The others shuffled out of the room in mortified silence, leaving me and the bitch alone. I began to cry. Miss Parce smiled at me and, in the phony manner of a wise, friendly teacher, said:
"
Now, now, my dear, no need to weep, I'm sure. . . .
"

As I sat there choking on my tears, I knew, Mama, that I would pay her back one day. Yes, Mama, I knew I would live to see her dead, mutilated, too, if I could manage it. But most important—
dead! dead! dead!

L
istening to the tape Diana brought back from Central Park, feeling her excitement rise at the sound of Diana's running feet, Tool's
"
uh!" as she plunged in the pin, the delicious squeal of the jogger victim, his
"
yeeeeeow!" as he was stuck, then his curses receding in the distance as Diana's feet hit dirt when she dodged off the running path and into the woods, Beverly knew she would always want Diana to bring back something from her missions.

It was only later, upon her realization that the quick kills Diana would be making would preclude the possibility of recording her quarries' cries of pain, that she evolved the notion of trophies. She wanted always to have something, some object taken from the Scenes of Bloodletting, to touch, caress, and hold. It would give immediacy to Diana's reports, and perhaps most important, it could be offered up to Mama on the wall.

M
ama told her: "Truly now, dear, in your training of Diana, you've found your true vocation. I think at heart you were always a behaviorist hiding in an analytic therapist's cloak. Rewards and punishments, increasingly complex tests of obedience—these are the only ways to dominate and compel. Certainly the progress you've made with the lynx proves the efficacy of your approach. My God, Bev, take a look, will you, at the incredible little tool you have wrought!"

T
he vigorous training workouts—long, slow, loping jogs along the bridle paths of Central Park; short, sharp wind sprints along the East River esplanade; huffing and puffing calisthenic sessions on the cold basement floor of the house; sweaty muscle building on the Nautilus machines at the Eighty-sixth Street Health Club; harsh, exhausting martial arts training at the West Side dojo; the special intensive ten-day commando course in Boulder, Colorado; endurance exercises; obedience tests; ice pick attack drills performed against straw dummies in your holiest of holies, your bedchamber—all were carefully designed to build strength and speed, refine coordination, increase response time, restore vigor in the face of fatigue, and, most important, inspire a yearning to kill.

Once the craving was instilled, the obsession would build, and once the obsession was implanted, the command to execute would be ardently obeyed. "It's all in the preparation," Mama told you. "The long, hard months of training will pay off," she said, "in the swift split seconds of attack." But since the kills will be so very swift, you and Tool must receive gratification some other way. Perhaps through slow rituals performed afterward upon the cadavers, rituals of vengeance by which your rage will be satiated and the humiliations you endured will be many times repaid. "Remember, Bev," Mama said, "it's not sufficient to settle your old accounts at par value. Too many years have passed; the interest has built up and by now far exceeds the original charges entered in your ledger."

D
iana Proctor stands poised in a
corner of the cellar, sleek and slinky in her black cotton bodysuit. Two specially designed holsters, each containing an ice pick, are strapped to her forearms. Across the room a scrawny tiger cat, abducted from the street, prowls around a plastic dish of kitty tuna bits.

Beverly studies the human lynx, breathing slowly, deeply, awaiting her order. Finally Beverly decides it's time.

"Kill it," she orders.

Diana doesn't move. Beverly approaches the girl, then slaps her hard,
smack!,
across her face.

Diana, eyes front, lips trembling, receives the blow as her due. Beverly watches as the pale skin of the lynx's cheek turns pink, then red from the impact. Both understand the meaning of this chastisement. Delay and/or squeamishness will not be tolerated.

"Kill! Kill the cat!" Beverly whispers her command, and this time an admonished Diana instantly obeys.

In a single, beautiful, scything balletic motion the tool executes the little creature. Afterward they both stare down at its rigid body, neck up, ice pick thrust through the throat deep into its tiny brain.

"Clean up the mess; deposit it in a trash can on the avenue; then report to me in my bedroom," Beverly orders. "I have a choice new punishment in mind for you, my dear. One that will, I'm sure, instill a greater eagerness to obey."

Diana, braced, nods acceptance of this directive. As Beverly turns, she smiles quietly to herself. The little lynx can't wait. She loves correction. She'll be lubricating like crazy by the time she mounts the stairs.

Y
ou told Tool to befriend the girl named Jess, the lovely, strong, brave gladiator at the dojo. You had in mind a kind of recruitment but naturally never mentioned your intentions.

A
fter Tool flew down to Florida, slew Bertha Parce, and brought back your trophy, a hair curler found in a funny bright blue plastic box beside the old schoolmarm's bed, you quizzed her endlessly about the gluing of the bitch's vagina, what it felt like to slather in the gooey stuff, then squeeze the labia majora shut.

"Did she smell down there?" you inquired, grinning.
"
Like a rotten old fish, I bet," you added, pinching your nostrils with disgust.

Your delighted interest in the aromatic dimension most definitely spurred Diana on. She described everything, as she'd been trained to do, in the most exhaustive detail. And you relished every word, for that was the bliss—the imagining of it, the reconstruction, the obsessive staging and restaging of the execution. Your re-creations, fueled by Diana's reportage, gave you more pleasure, you were certain, than anything you might have felt had you gone down there and done the wonderful deed yourself. Your imagination, embellishing powerfully upon the details Diana provided, could create scenes far more intense than what had actually taken place.

I
t was so funny, Mama, when Carl went through the file and kept pulling out the reports I'd planted so carefully, ingeniously, and diligently through the years, flatly written case file summaries which contained no evaluations, no recommendations, and certainly no self-congratulation.

They purported to be simple factual accounts of Diana Proctor's treatment, and Carl kept quoting them to me, saying things like "Just listen to what you wrote, Bev!" and "Jeez, Bev, listen to this!" and "God's sakes, Bev, can't you see the forest for the trees?" He was using them, see, to try to convince me the little murderess had recovered and was ready for release. And I kept resisting: "I'm not sure, Carl"; "I might have overstated that, Carl"; "But don't forget, she killed them, Carl—killed them, then split their crotches with an ax!"

I toyed with him until I got him riled. I was acting like a hard-ass, he said, a tough bitch shrink, the kind he hated, and he was genuinely surprised since when he'd hired me, it was for my humanity, not my clinical skills or my degrees. What happened to my compassion anyway, he wanted to know, and had it occurred to me I might have spent too many years playing shrink-goddess to my patients, in the process losing sight of them as vulnerable human beings? At the very least I owed Diana the benefit of a doubt. I'd brought her along this far; why the hell couldn't I see she was ready to go the distance? And I just stared at him, Mama, until he started to rave: What kind of a person was I? Had I become one of those neurotic power-tripping shrinks who refuse to let a patient go because they can't bear to relinquish their control?

See, Mama, he was using my own words to make his case, and the longer I refused to buy it, the stronger became his conviction he was right. In the end, when I finally relented, his investment in Diana's "rehabilitation" exceeded anything I could have worked up with a direct appeal. I hornswoggled the little twerp, and he never knew it. I'm telling you, Mama, it was so damn funny to watch him fall so easily into the trap that took me the better part of five years to lay. Like taking candy from a baby. It was just, I don't know . . . hysterical.

T
here was another little trap I laid, not for Carl but for Diana. Call it my safety valve, Mama. I laid it . . . just in case.

The trap consisted of creating a traceable path between Diana and the signature, a path that would not run through me. So I instructed her to tell Carl, Sue Farber, the librarian, and a couple of her cronies among the patients that she was a sort of "wallflower type," and that was why she didn't like going to hospital dances. None of them would think anything of it, unless, of course, they were questioned about it later on. Then they'd all remember, wouldn't they? You bet they would!

I also had her sign a note to me with a droopy flower leaning against a wall, a note I could plant without comment in her file. The best part of it was the way I persuaded Diana that the devalued flower she'd leave at each gluing would, in fact, be
her
signature.

A neat little double trap, if I do say so, for although she would only be the tool, she would
think
she was the artist!

B
everly Archer, wearing a prim navy blue wool skirt and freshly ironed white blouse, sits in a chair in her bedroom facing the full-length life-size oil painting of her mother on the wall. Diana Proctor squats on the floor between Beverly's legs, also facing the portrait. The girl wears jeans but is bare above the waist.

"You know why we're facing Mama?" Beverly asks. "You do, don't you?"

Diana shakes her head. "I'm not sure," she whispers.

Beverly, tightening her grip by pressing her knees together, feels the girl shudder.
The little lynx is afraid,
she thinks.
As well she might be, considering she's about to get it.