by Cathy Lamb
I stalked across the stage, my face up on those ginormous video screens. “I have secrets that I have desperately, with every fiber of my being, tried to hide, and yet . . . I can’t hide them anymore. Someone else has taken control of my past and is going to reveal those secrets very soon.”
I felt so calm suddenly. So very calm. Annie was somewhere out there. In my head, I reached for her hand.
“In the last months someone else has taken control of my life. I have told you a thousand times not to allow that to happen. You. Take. Control. Do not be a guest in your own life, do not let someone run your life, do not stay offstage. Be onstage, and be the star of your life. But I have not taken that advice myself. Someone else has decided that now is the time to reveal who I am to you. To everyone.”
I stopped and tapped a heel. “I’m not gonna let them do that. No, I’m done. I’m taking the control back. Ladies, I want to tell you about my childhood.”
I told them about Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor, and they belly laughed and smiled at my stories of plumes of hair spray, Grandmother Schiller, Shoney’s paintings of naked women in town, my momma’s blunt advice, her pink outfits, the chandeliers. I told about Carman’s champagne drinking while reading love scenes aloud from bodice busters, Trudy Jo’s ranting about her children and Shakespeare, Shell Dee’s fascination with the human body. I told them how I played violin with our momma, how Annie played piano with our dad, how we made up songs together and danced on the grass by our house by the sea.
I told them about Big Luke, and how we painted his nails and made him funny hats that he wore and how he encouraged us to be ourselves. I talked about the storm that killed him and watching my momma on the cliff with her pink shawl flying behind her. I could hear women sniffling in the front rows.
And, finally, I talked about Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin.
I did not become too graphic. What would be the point? But I told about what happened in our own home with Sherwinn, the dilapidated shack, the slimy feel of the walls, the metallic taste of the water, the old pizza lying about.
I told them what we had to do for the click, click, click.
I heard their gasps, moans, more tears. In fact, I put several photos up on the video screens. They weren’t the most graphic, but you got the point. I did not leave them there long.
I tried not to cry. It didn’t work, but I did not let my tears ruin the rhythm, the message of my speech. Soon it began to feel like a group cry.
I spoke about the trial, and how my momma shot all three of those sick monsters and said, “This is from Big Luke. He’s going to escort you to hell. Good-bye,” and how I’ve heard those six gunshots my whole life.
I told them about her tumor, her terminal illness, how she had to guarantee herself that her girls would live to see their own grandchildren. I told them about her trial, the cotton candy pink heels and the yellow hope ribbon, her excruciating physical pain and how she dedicated the last months of her life to us until it was unbearable and she took the boat out, dropped herself into the sea, and met our dad in the clouds.
I had to pause there and wipe my face. I noticed the Rock Your Womanhood chiefs out of the corner of my eye. They were riveted.
I told the ladies how I had tried to bury everything, and how it hadn’t worked.
“I’m damaged.” I admitted that truth into the caverns of the conference center, knowing Annie was there. “I. Am. Damaged. I am damaged down to the core of my soul and, currently, unfortunately, I’m being blackmailed for the photos that were taken of my sister and me as children.”
I heard the gasp. Thousands of women sucking in air at once.
“Blackmailed. Some creep sent me the photos and told me if I didn’t hand over an insane amount of money, he would hand those photos out like candy. I don’t want the photos out there, but more than that, I do not want to be held captive by this man. I can’t. I can’t have one more man ruining my life, controlling any part of it. I won’t have it.”
“Good for you, Madeline, you ass kicker!” One woman stood and raised her fist in victory.
Another woman, about twenty rows back, stood and yelled, “That’s right! Don’t take any shit!”
A third. “Captivity is not for us, Madeline! We’re women!”
“So I took action.” I let my voice rise.
“Yeah! Yeah!” those noisy women yelled, then applauded.
“I called the police.” They applauded louder. They got on their feet!
“As we speak, that man is being arrested.”
“Yeeesss!”
“He will pay for what he’s done.” I did not mention how Sam’s house had been exploded.
Woo-ha! Hee-haw! Ear-splitting noise.
I did not repeat the comment from the woman in the front row who yelled, “I hope they cut his penis off!”
Or the comment from her girlfriend, which was, “Boil his balls! Boil his balls!”
I then made a short rant on porn—how it’s an infectious disease in our country, how children are being abused, how I would stand for children in this terrible business, how it would be my new mission in life. “I’m out of the closet, and I will drag other people out of the closet who are committing criminal acts against our kids!”
Whooee! They fisted their hands in Woman Power victory, like I’d taught them.
As they were screaming, I remembered my visit with the Portland FBI days before.
They came to my house in Portland. Annie was there, too. We showed them the photos and the blackmail notes. The latest: $350,000. Or else.
Even the FBI guys looked a little green as they stared at the photos.
Keith Stein, my bulldog attorney, whom I had asked to be with us, started bawling like a baby.
I showed them the latest note. I told them who I thought it was. Pauly’s son, Sam.
“We’ll fry him,” the FBI guy said.
“And the pictures,” I said. “I don’t want them released. I don’t want anyone to see them.”
“We understand,” the agent said. He had white hair and eyes that had been around the block a thousand difficult times. He cleared his throat. “Miss O’Shea, I’m sorry this happened to you and your sister. I remember the case. I was a young rookie in Boston then and I’m . . .” He cleared his throat again. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” another agent said, her hair pulled back in a clip. “Tragic. How are you ladies doing?”
Annie and I glanced at each other. “Not bad,” I said.
“We’re not feeling explosive anymore,” Annie said.
I tried not to laugh.
Keith the bulldog kept bawling like a baby.
I waved all the clapping, hooting women back down.
“I also recently found out that I am not who I thought I was. You see, my momma’s maiden name was Marie Elise Laurent. That’s the name under which she was traveling from France, then to Spain, after walking over the Pyrenees and traveling to America when she was a young girl. That was the name on her papers. Her father’s name was Anton Laurent, her mother’s name was Emmanuelle Laurent. But those weren’t their real names. Their real names, I have come to find, were Abe Bacherach and Dynah Rossovsky. My momma’s real name was Anna Bacherach. They were Jews. My grandma is not my biological grandma, she is my great-aunt. I’ll wait until you can get ahold of all this. It took me a bit.”
I waited. While I waited, I breathed. My breathing was easier. The air didn’t seem stuck so bad.
“My biological grandma’s name was Madeline Rossovsky Bacherach, I am named for her. My grandma Madeline jumped from a second-story window, her son in her arms, while being chased by the Nazis. Her injuries were extensive. She dragged herself to a doctor’s home, someone willing to help, but was too injured to escape. When my granddad and my grandma Emmanuelle refused to leave her, she killed herself with a knife.”
I did not miss yet another gasp in that audience. A collective inhale.
“My family, what was left of it, fled
from the Nazis. They fled to live.”
I told the rest of that complicated story, but I did not tell about how Granddad stole the papers. I couldn’t cause him more pain, especially in his condition, at his age, and not here. It wasn’t my place, and it would do no good for the smiling Laurents.
“I sensed, when I was a child, that my grandparents and my parents knew something I didn’t know, that there was a secret. I knew there was someone named Ismael, but I didn’t know who Ismael was. Now I do. Ismael Bacherach was my grandparents’ late son, the brother of my momma. They have spent their whole lives missing him, loving him, feeling him in their hearts. My momma used to talk to him outside by the sea as she played her violin.”
I stopped so I wouldn’t sob. My dear momma, longing for her brother, talking to him into the cool sea air.
“What I’ve learned from all of this is that we can’t move on from our tragedies until we deal with them, until we face them. I need to move on, fully, from my tragedies. Here’s what I know: I am Madeline O’Shea. Flawed. Wracked with a lot of pain. Struggling. Wrestling with life. But I am trying. I am trying to be better, trying to be authentic, trying to be me. Trying to feel clean after what I went through as a girl, trying to feel pure, trying not to let my emotional dirt smother me, stamp out my breath, crush my soul. I have been driven by my emotional dirt for too long.”
I wiped the tears from my face, but darned if this whole thing wasn’t feeling cathartic.
“I want you ladies to close your eyes. Think of the emotional dirt in your life. Cry if you want. But think about what’s been wrapped around you tight and hard and hurtful. Think about something that happened. Maybe something you did, something that was done to you, a terrible mistake, or many terrible mistakes that you made. Think about your losses, your hurts. I’m giving you time.”
I waited for two minutes. There were a lot of women there, and those tears and sobs came. I was a mess. They were a mess. We were all a mess.
“Now, ladies, stand up. Put an imaginary pencil in your hand and write in the air about your emotional dirt. Write it all down. I’ll wait.”
I waited for two more minutes. We were all a mess as those pencils went flying.
“You want to cry? You cry then!” I shouted at them. “Cry. Get it out. Scream it out, yell! Let it out, ladies. We can’t keep this inside anymore, it’s killing us. Let me hear it!”
A woman in one of the front rows yelled, “You failed me, Mother.”
Another announced, “I’m lonely and I think I’m gay!”
“I still love my ex-husband, the pig . . . I haven’t had sex in eight years! I’m addicted to pain killers . . . I’m unhappy . . . My mother was never there for me . . . My father is in jail . . . My brother brags all the time and I wanna strangle him . . . my childhood sucked . . . I was abused by . . . I’m broke . . . my daughter’s an alcoholic . . .”
I waited another two minutes for that internal muck to be released, then I changed course.
“Now you ladies listen to me,” I boomed out, ferocious again, my hellfire gathered up and burning bright. “You listen. You drop that pencil on the ground, that pencil that spelled out your hurt. Drop it.” I watched hands drop that pencil. “Stomp on it! I mean it, I want to hear you stomping!”
I heard it, they stomped.
“Rip down that piece of paper you were writing on in space. Rip it! Rip it!” I saw women waving their hands through the air. “Set it on fire! Get those flames whipped right up! It’s on fire, right? The ashes are floating down? Stomp on those ashes.” I heard ’em stomping again.
“Scream at those ashes!”
They screamed.
“Yell, ‘Never again will I let my emotional dirt hurt me!’ ”
They yelled it.
“Yell, ‘I am done with it, I am done with the dirt!’”
They yelled again.
“ ‘I am clean, I am pure!’ ”
Man, those yells hurled round and round the convention center walls.
“Scream it again! Scream it again!”
Those ladies almost brought the roof down.
“You know where my transformation is going to start? Do you know? Right here.” I pointed down at the floor, then out into the audience, up into the balconies. “Right now. I’m starting with how I look. I don’t like my suits. I don’t like how businesslike they are. I don’t like the boring colors. I don’t like the matchy-matchy look to them. I don’t like that I feel as if I’m in a linen straitjacket and a chastity belt at the same time. I wore them to put armor over myself so I could believe I was someone. What a joke! A suit cannot make you someone. Only you can make yourself someone. And the suits aren’t me. Not me at all. You want to see the new me?” They clapped. They hooted. “Are you sure?” They screamed that they did.
I envisioned my momma, arms up, cheering, reminding me it was a “cardinal sin” to be frumpy.
“Let me show you.” I nodded at the sound guy, who turned on a funny strip tease number as I took off one piece of clothing, and another, and another.
When I was done I was standing in my new favorite outfit: A shiny pink and black cheetah print skirt. A black lace shirt. A black leather jacket with a yellow ribbon for hope tucked into the pocket.
Georgie and I had gone shopping together. She said, “You have put a screech on your hormonal layer of cataclysmic inner turpitude.”
I did not know what a hormonal layer of cataclysmic inner turpitude meant. “What does that mean?”
“It means, my rad boss, that you like yourself now and you are roaring.”
Yep, I was getting there, getting to like myself.
The finishing touch? I kicked off my dull heels, grabbed a bag onstage, and slipped on the cotton candy pink heels my momma wore.
The spotlights beamed down on me as I yanked the rubber band and bobby pins out of my hair and fluffed it. My curls cascaded to my shoulders—no more flat ironing for me. No more killing my hair because of what Sherwinn had done to my curls. “I have trapped my curls like I have trapped my life because they reminded me of something sad that happened to my sister and me, something sick. But I will have no more trapping in my life. None. Here’s my curls, here’s me! Here. I. Am.”
They cheered. My, how they cheered.
“This is me. This is Madeline O’Shea. No more lies. No more burying my past. No more secrets. This is me and you, all of us here together. I am me and I rock! Rock your womanhood, ladies! Rock your womanhood. Say it with me!”
Pandemonium. Groovy, yeah. They loved it. Rock Your Womanhood!
Loved it.
“No more lies, ladies, no more muck. Be you! Be yoooouuuuuu!”
I almost felt like dancing.
Annie and I scrambled out to the limousine after I’d been onstage three times with standing ovations.
When we pulled away from the curb, she opened a cabinet, pulled out two champagne glasses, poured the champagne, and handed me one.
“Cheers,” she said.
“Cheers.”
“You rocked my womanhood.”
“Thank you. Back at ya.”
The days after my speech were jammed with calls, e-mails, reporters.
I was a story.
I had circumvented Marlene’s article, not only with my speech at the convention center but Boutique printed my speech, in full, in their magazine. Newspapers covered it, too. I took some vengeful glee in cutting her off at the knees. It’s not personal.
Her article came out. It received scant publicity. There was nothing in it about Granddad, the stolen papers, Auschwitz or Drancy and the real Laurents. Perhaps Marlene couldn’t prove it. Perhaps it wasn’t relevant to the article on my mother and the trials. Perhaps she was so steamed I beat her to the punch, she gave up and wrote the thing without further ado. I don’t know.
In future articles I took the opportunity to rail against child porn. “It’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s hideous. People who traffic in this, who produce or distribute
this smack, should be jailed. No, it is not okay to buy it. No, it is not okay to have it in your collection. It’s not harmless. Without a market for child porn, we wouldn’t have children in porn, being abused, raped, and attacked. You are guilty if you are looking at it.”
Click, click, click.
Somehow, though, when I announced that I’d been blackmailed, it triggered creepy men to say online in their perverted chat rooms that they had the images of Annie and me in their collections, too. How they boasted. How proud they were. How special. They had photos of Madeline O’Shea! Famous lady! Naked! Did you see the one with her dressed in high heels and nothing else, bending over to touch her toes? Did you see the one with the rope? What about the one with the guy in the blond wig and her. . . .
I had Keith Stein, that bulldog, hire a computer forensics guy. The FBI ran stings with local police. They went to pornography-loving men’s homes. One of them was a prominent attorney from a wealthy family. He had a trust fund.
I am now suing him for that trust fund. His wife has left him. She will take half of what is left.
Another man had a massive collection of child porn, including photos of Annie and me.
He was a U.S. senator. He, too, had a fortune.
I am now suing the U.S. senator for that fortune. He has resigned under an onslaught of publicity.
A third man sent us a letter and said he had stacks of our photos. “Mountains of them. I’ve got a price. Give me a call.” Dumb man. A friend of Sam’s. He lived above his mechanic’s shop on the Cape.
Annie went to Fiji. She is a little off her rocker. He does not have a home anymore, or a mechanics shop, or photos. He has been arrested. The newspaper noted that a gas line leaked and sparks from a machine led to the fire. Troubling, it was, two fires in such a short amount of time on the Cape.
It is my new life’s mission to eliminate the production and distribution of child porn. I will do whatever it takes to prevent any child from going through what Annie and I went through. I owe it to those children. If I can prevent this relentless misery for one child, it is worth it.