by JJ Partridge
She left the office, albeit, disappointed I had not risen to the bait, leaving me to wonder if even in death, Reinman would be forgiven by the Marcies on our campus. As an undergraduate, she along with her classmates had idolized Reinman, then the iconic leader of faculty radicals who made Carter University the hot campus of its day, a place of no grades, open curriculum, Third World Studies programs, and a deconstructionalist view of the world. Years later, when Reinman morphed into an ideologue of the political right, Marcie, along with her contemporaries on Carter’s faculty and elsewhere, felt betrayed. Pens were dipped in vitriol as academia complained that he had sold out to the Republicans, that his highly publicized conversion was all too pat and opportunistic, and the disparagement of his motives and ideology remained unabated to this day. Personally, my few conversations with him had been friendly enough, even if it didn’t take much, I recalled, to get his back up whenever the liberal bent of our faculty or the current campus cause was the topic.
The Chapel Bell began to toll eleven, reminding me of schedules and work. I turned to the computer and scrolled through files. I intended to read what the Information Office had previously released as coming from the President on The Stalker but stopped at my saved files and clicked on “Incidents and Victims.” A list of names and dates filled the screen. “Sarah Tyson—October 10; Yvonne Kafume—October 17; Maria DeGoes—October 24; Francine Johnson—October 31; Juanita Jones—November 6; Latoya Chapin—November 13.” Then, two Saturdays without attacks. I started to type in “Anne Sullivan” when Marcie’s certainty slowed my fingers.
That neat chronology was at the heart of the University’s dilemma. In point of fact, until the rape of Francine Johnson, the fourth Stalker victim, none of the assaults had been reported to any University office through the ignorance, indifference, or embarrassment of the victims, and the complete disregard for common security concerns by the Providence police. Each of the first three victims had been saved by the chance intervention of others: Ms. Tyson, thrown into an alley next to a student hangout at Hope and Gower Streets, by bar-goers entering the alley to relieve themselves; Ms. Kafume, cornered in the vestibule of a rooming house at the RISD end of Benefit Street, by the arrival of another lodger; and Ms. DeGoes, a graduate student from Recife, Brazil, attacked while jogging after midnight on Arnold Street, by a late-night walker and his Rottweiler. Ms. Tyson and Ms. Kafume filed complaints with the cops although neither contacted the Security Office—as all students are instructed and continuously reminded—and the police hadn’t bothered to inform us either.
Francine Johnson’s rape changed everything. He broke into her apartment on Young Orchard Street, waited for her to return, held a black handled knife at her throat, threatened to slash her face, gagged her, pulled off her jeans, and raped her, all the while muttering loathsome, racist filth. Although seriously injured, she dragged herself to the nearby Infirmary and the assault was reported immediately to both the police and Security Office. Francine was the first to be threatened with a knife.
I recalled vividly how College Hall blew it then and there. We couldn’t get ahead of the news. While Francine Johnson’s rape drew an inside story in the Journal and didn’t make television news, the Crier naturally blasted away; since she was a member of the Student Council, her rape had a tremendous campus impact which gave impetus to the other victims to surface with crushing rapidity. On Tuesday, Yvonne Kafume gave the Crier an interview on her assault, replete with a graphic recitation of her attacker’s choice of language. Sarah Tyson went public on Wednesday, and when Maria DeGoes went to a counselor at the Women’s Center, she was in the Crier on Thursday. Providence television news and the Journal as well as Boston and New York newspapers were now into the story and a headline writer at the Boston Herald came up with the name “The Carter Stalker”—which made the Admissions Office cringe—when it became clear that the victims’ descriptions of their assailants matched: medium height and bulky, dark leather jacket, black gloves, black wool cap, mesh nylon mask, guttural voice, fetid breath, and body odor. An artist depiction, useless without a face, was generated for the campus and by the weekend, the cops, College Hall, the Security Office, and the Crier put it together: “Fingers” had returned, with a vengeance.
“Fingers!” I spit out and sat back. Last spring, Fingers had been a creep who jumped out of late night shadows to get his jollies with a grope at female flesh before running off at the first resistance. A burly guy in a black jacket, black gloves, and black wool cap, with breath like a toad that every victim remembered. Back then, he exhibited no obvious racial bias in his choice of victims and—maybe this was the reason the Security Office matched the cops in lassitude—he didn’t use a weapon. Shamefully, with so many other things on the agenda in College Hall, including the inauguration of a new president, and with the Security Office in caretaker mode after its chief resigned in frustration at the University’s ambivalence on security issues, College Hall tacitly accepted the kids’ take of Fingers as a wimp so feckless in his attempts that he deserved his dismissive nickname. Sure, flyers were posted and campus patrols beefed up but when his attacks ceased after Commencement, and the summer session passed without incident, he was off our screen.
Until now.
I went to the next victim, Juanita Jones. The first week in November was memorable. Nothing went right. College Hall’s responses to the crisis smacked of a whiney “it’s not our fault!” while the Security Office, its ignorance of the three prior assaults admitted, was castigated by the usual anti-everything campus activists along with the justifiably concerned. It didn’t help when Tuttle, who had been hired in August, told the Crier that coordination with the Providence police was “inadequate,” which, of course, infuriated Chief McCarthy, a man known to glory in his disdain of the University. Within the inner sanctum of his third floor office in the Public Safety Building, McCarthy, Tuttle learned, had given us a Providence salute: “Fuck’em! They want a cop on every corner, fer chrissakes, and here they are marchin’ with Jesse Kingdom and his mob. Fuhgeddaboutit!” There went any chance of a focused investigation or a dragnet and questioning of past offenders.
The lack of police support kept us vulnerable on the following Saturday night, when despite a full force of security officers deployed on and near the campus, Juanita Jones, captain of the women’s track team, was assaulted outside an apartment building in Fox Point. She managed to fight him off, report the incident that night, and leave for her home in Chicago the following morning. Her absence led to wild rumors and it took days to get the story out with some semblance of truth.
Not that truth mattered much; with this attack, the activists and campus fringies had momentum. An over-the-top rally on The Green the following Tuesday brought out hundreds of students shrilly demanding protection and threatening a campus shutdown. Not unsurprisingly, a significant portion of the faculty, especially younger ones who thought they had missed out on the thrill of campus militancy enjoyed by a prior generation—a nostalgie de la boue, a nostalgia for the mud, according to one of the deans—agreed or acquiesced or accommodated and their classes became little more than consciousness-raising sessions. The routine of the University began to grind to a halt.
I was now at the last screen. Latoya Chapin, a senior from Baltimore, vice-chair of the Black Student Caucus, the daughter of a congressman, a charming young woman with crinkly, intelligent eyes, and hitting me close to home, my student intern last year, second semester. On the following Saturday night, despite safety admonitions of every kind, our entire security force and even a few cops in the neighborhood, she answered a knock at the door of her second floor apartment on Olive Street and The Stalker was inside, his knife at her throat. Before, during, and after her brutal rape, he spewed humiliating, racist trash. After he left, she called 911 and collapsed. With the lurid facts reported in Monday’s Journal, embellished on local television, and exaggerated in the Crier, the campus roiled with strident condemnations of the University and th
e police—which didn’t go unnoticed in the Public Safety Building or City Hall. The shutdown movement gathered steam as the media invaded the campus: when they didn’t interview victims, they got to victim’s friends, or friends of friends, or anybody else with a gripe with the University or Providence cops and time for a sound bite. The New York Times ran a front page story headlined “Campus in Crisis” and Oprah found Juanita Jones and paired her with other college rape victims for a weepy, chilling hour. Parents bombarded College Hall with complaints, alumni around the country sounded alarms, the local NAACP chapter president wondered loudly about the University’s “inaction,” Reverend Jesse Kingdom blasted our Security Office as well as the cops, and the Admissions Office noted a sharp drop in applications and campus visits. Carter University was living its worst nightmare: national and bad, very bad, publicity with the potential for shutdown.
“Ugh!”
As I closed the file to begin drafting Danby’s statement, I recalled his empathetic demeanor only a few days earlier as Latoya’s father, the congressman, paced the President’s office. His palms pounded each other in rage. His daughter had been raped! The University was culpable! He was hiring a Johnnie Cochrane! “This should not be happening to black women under a black man’s care!”
Danby’s expression indicated to Dwayne McAllister and myself that we shouldn’t respond, so we didn’t. Only nine months earlier, Charles Danby had been the surprise choice of the Board of Trustees who had plucked him from obscurity at a small, midwestern liberal arts college and installed him as Carter’s fourteenth president and the first black president of an Ivy League institution. He was beginning to resolve the leadership vacuum left by his predecessor but watching him take the father’s wrath, the depth of weariness in his dark eyes was palpable, as though his presidency was about to be overwhelmed by events. Already there were nasty rumblings, repeated meanly even among some faculty and administrators, that maybe Danby wasn’t up to the challenge. Even more despicable was the rumor that The Stalker’s attacks were the direct result of the massive, positive publicity attending Danby’s selection and inauguration as President. How else, the gossips whispered, to explain that in a city with eight other colleges and universities, with thousands of women students, a substantial portion of whom are black, all The Stalker’s victims are Carter women. Black Carter women.
CHAPTER THREE
After finishing my draft of Danby’s statement and reviewing Marcie’s edits, I e-mailed the finished product to the Provost, the President’s secretary, and the Information Office. The draft and editing had taken longer than I expected—it was close to one o’clock—and I was pleased that the statement was not especially trite, despite the difficulty of trying to say something that hadn’t been already repeated ad nauseam. I was hungry enough to brave a frigid wind that was warning Providence of the imminence of winter for a take-out lunch. When I felt my Blackberry’s vibrations, I was on Thayer Street, heading back from Johnny Rockets with a paper bag containing plastic tubs of chili con carne and salsa, and an Orangina. Its screen displayed a number that I knew well and which could not be dealt with on the run.
Back in College Hall, Maria flagged me down as I passed her desk; she cradled her phone with her neck and held up a pink “while you were out” note. She mouthed to me, “Your mother called.”
“I know,” I said, and touched the cell phone, at my belt. I snatched the note, aware of the knowing look from Maria. Victoria Elizabeth Mason Temple did not use voice mail. Nor e-mail, as she found it intrusive as soon as the first bit of porno spam hit her computer screen. I took off my Burberry and suit jacket and sat at my desk to decipher Maria’s scribbles: “Reverend Thomas called Sylvia. Police ...” and something illegible “... student. Member of church .... Needs help. Call before 3:45.”
I was glad that I had a clue as to her concern before returning the call. Sylvia Odum has been my mother’s cook, maid, confidante, and companion for decades. Reverend Thomas is Sylvia’s pastor, the elderly minister of a black Baptist Church on Halsey Street, and a not unfamiliar figure to me when there was a pastoral request for the church’s needy, fuel bills, repairs to the roof or pipe organ, or other expenses that my family had traditionally and anonymously underwritten. I touched the microphone and speaker buttons on the telephone console and one labeled “home”. Sylvia answered.
“Hi, is she there?”
“She’s upstairs. Let me tell her you are on the phone.” I was put on hold as Sylvia used the intercom. That meant that Sylvia was in her kitchen, comfortable in its dated décor of pastel pink and green tiles, vintage appliances, and triple sinks, maybe with freshly baked bread cooling on the table. Mmmm. I removed the lid from the chili container, poured in the salsa, put a paper napkin under my chin, and had dipped in a plastic spoon when I heard my mother’s beguiling, Low Country accented voice.
“I wish Reverend Thomas had called you di-rectly. I spoke to the po-or man. Always something, isn’t it? Seems the son of a church member knew this girl ..., the student ..., who was murdered over the weekend ..., the Carter student? And the police are looking to question the boy. Now, with all of these racial problems in the city, he needs some advice and wants to talk to you ....”
“Reverend Thomas or the boy?”
“Reverend Thomas.” Pause. “I think.”
“This is a murder investigation, Mom, and I—”
The serene self-confidence of a grand dame in her late seventies was in her voice as it rose ever so slightly. “Of course, I to-ld Reverend Thomas that you would as soon as you could. In fact, I to-ld him I’d see if you could be here around four o’clock.”
My mother’s aplomb had been nurtured by her Beaufort heritage and a friendship, beginning at Sarah Lawrence, with socialite Jacqueline Bouvier, grown through marriage to my father—a war hero, Jack Kennedy pal, Democratic fundraiser, and heir to the Temple fortune—and matured as she took on his leadership role in civic, charity, and political fundraising when he died after a horrific battle with cancer when brother Nick and I were ten and eight respectively. Nick and I grew up under her strict but loving guidance, watching others comply with her gently given orders; to this day, she remains our family’s conscience and arbitrator of standards. “You should speak to him in the study. He’ll be comfortable there.”
I shook my head, resignedly. I knew the drill. Reverend Thomas’ church and its congregation remained a family responsibility. Okay, it sounds patronizing, but there it is. Within my family, racial inequality is America’s greatest tragedy, its greatest injustice, and you do what you can. Victoria Elizabeth Mason Temple would expect my full attention, despite complications and time constraints, and so would Sylvia, even though the church my mother remembered fondly for its religiosity, its traditions, and service to the black community was now a dwindling congregation of white-haired women and a few old men, a church that had lost out to more socially active, evangelical or mainstream denominational churches throughout the East Side. Not that it would have made any difference to Victoria Elizabeth Mason Temple. Family responsibilities were timeless.
My failure to respond quickly brought a subtle rebuke. “Reverend Thomas is ..., we are all ..., getting on. Only more reason to assist when we can. I’m going to be at your Aunt Vera’s at four for tea. See what is troubling that po-or man, dear, and help him out if you can.”
And that was it. I agreed to meet him and we said goodbye. I had once again been called for duty. I finished my rations like a good soldier and arranged my work schedule to meet her challenge.
* * *
At five minutes before four, after checking the Journal’s website—nothing on the murder—I was walking past the brick-faced dorms of the Old Quad and down Carter Street to the smooth cobblestones of Boone Lane, my hands deep inside my raincoat’s pockets. Within moments, I reached the driveway gap in the mossy brownstone walls of Mary Street where the wide, ornately embellished iron gates to Temple House were open. As I turned into the rising, grav
eled drive, a shaft of sunlight escaped pewter-gray clouds, illuminating the mansion’s ruddy bricks and flashing off its white balustrades and three floors of double-width, multi-paned windows. The scene was so striking that I paused.
Temple House had been on my mind since Thanksgiving. Nick, up from New York City with his family for the holidays, suggested, as we played billiards after dinner, that we ought to be thinking about what was going to happen to the house after our mother passes. Neither of us would reside there. Would the University accept a donation? Or the Historical Society? Probably both would if we pledged enough capital to insure the maintenance, in perpetuity, of the house with its outbuildings and its two acres of landscaped grounds, ancient copper beeches, elms, oaks, and mock cherry trees, and formal gardens.
Since our conversation, my mind had been uneasy as to the inevitable change. For six generations, the mansion had been not Temple House to our family but our home. Even now, there stirred within me a pang of family pride. Sitting on the highest ground of Providence’s historic East Side, with views to Narragansett Bay and a downtown where the oldest structures are still known as Temple Bank and Temple Exchange, Temple House, a paragon of early American design and craftsmanship, rightly deserves the compliment bestowed by John Quincy Adams: the “most elegant formal house in New England.”
An impatient car horn on Benefit Street ended my rumination. I resumed my walk up the drive, past beds of impatiens and nasturtiums, to a turn-around in front of a four stall garage and a narrower continuation that ran under a porte-cochere at the rear of the house. My mother’s ten year old Volvo station wagon was missing from the drive which meant she had already left for English tea, bite-sized sandwiches or sponge cake, and gossip at the home of my maiden aunt a few blocks away on John Street. I unlocked the door, wiped my shoes on the cocoa mat, and went through the rear hall, pantry, and kitchen to the spacious center hall. Its massive crystal chandelier was, as usual, unlit and what sparse light there was passed through the famously decorated stained glass window—Rhode Island’s state seal of a golden anchor wrapped by a banner proclaiming “Hope”—over the double front doors. Sylvia was sitting on a bench under a seascape of storm driven surf by William Troast Richards, her green cardigan sweater covering her more than ample figure. Next to her, almost hidden by her bulk, was Reverend Thomas.