“She told people she was clumsy,” I said.
“And of course everyone believed her.” Trudy shook her head and laid the papers back on her desk. “Never underestimate the powers of denial,” she said. “So where do you want to shoot this? The last crew that came through here thought the kitchen had the best light.”
Oh, good, I thought to myself. She’d done this before. I wouldn’t have to waste time training her. “What were they shooting?”
“A BBC series on castration. I’m an expert,” she said, leading me around another bookshelf and through a narrow hallway, also lined on either side with books.
“Oh?” I said, my eyes widening.
Trudy started to laugh. “No, not on the physical act. On placing the act in a sociohistorical framework. I teach women’s studies, honey. Not pruning.” We arrived in her small galley kitchen, miraculously devoid of all literature save the morning’s paper. “How’s this?”
“Perfect,” I said. I pulled out my tripod and camera.
“You know,” Trudy said. “I have to say I’m glad you’re doing this research. I’ve been meaning to do it myself, but I haven’t figured out a way to stay neutral. I guess I’m still angry.”
“At your sister?”
“No. How could I be angry at her? At her husband. At the patriarchy in general. At the kind of society that would leave a woman no other choice than to do away with herself and her children. Cookie?” She held out a tin.
“No, thanks.” I attached a microphone to the neck of her caftan, positioned her chair out of direct sunlight, pushed her gray hair slightly back from her face, and turned on the camera. Then I brushed some crumbs off my own chair and sat down. “For the slate, this is an interview with Trudy Levine, Adele Cassidy’s younger sister. Trudy, why don’t you tell me about your sister?”
“Okay, let me think of how I want to phrase it . . .” She paused, considering her words carefully and taking a deep breath before speaking. “My sister committed suicide when I was twenty-nine years old. I was a doctoral student in sociology at the time and unmarried, which meant I was already considered an old maid. In fact, I remember April and Lily once playing that card game. We were all in Dewey Beach together, and Lily started crying when she got the old maid card. ‘What’s so wrong with being an old maid?’ I say. And Lily answers, ‘It’s not normal.’ ‘Not normal?’ I say. ‘And just who do you think decides what constitutes “normal”?’ And Lily answers, without missing a beat, ‘My father. He says you’re not normal.’ Well, I laid into Adele after that, asked her what kind of judgmental hooey that husband of hers was feeding to my nieces, and I expected her to defend him, like she was always defending him, but instead she started to cry.
“My sister was a nurse before she met her husband. I’d visit her sometimes, during school breaks. I’d come down on the train with boxes of banana bread and cookies from Schrafft’s that my mother would stick in my bag, for her ‘working daughter.’ Everyone at the hospital loved Adele, and she reveled in their affection. Shep, in fact, was one of her patients. The family joke was that he was admitted with a hernia and walked out with a bride, which lost its humor quickly. Everyone could see she was better off before he showed up. He was the one who made her quit after Lily was born. He said it wasn’t ‘normal’ for a mother to work, and she caved to his wishes, even though the hospital had offered her a reduced schedule. Anyway, so she starts crying that day, and I ask her what’s wrong, and she says, ‘My life is a sham.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I say. And she tells me she and Shep haven’t had sex in two years. Shep has been drinking more, visiting strip clubs. She thinks he’s having an affair with that neighbor of theirs, Mavis.”
“Really?” I said. “I just spoke to Mavis this morning. She claimed it was your sister who was having the affair, with Lenny Morton.”
“Ha!” Trudy expelled a great guffaw, causing the flesh on her upper body to undulate. She plucked the mic off her collar and spoke directly into it. “My sister was NOT having an affair. I repeat, NOT having an affair.” Then she reattached it. “Although I guess you could make the argument that Lenny—who, by the way, was just figuring out he was gay—filled an emotional void in her life, and she filled one in his, and in that sense their relationship could have been interpreted as a betrayal. I don’t know. I wasn’t actually paying attention back then. I was too busy writing papers attacking the institution of marriage as fundamentally corrupt. It’s still corrupt, as far as I’m concerned, the last form of socially acceptable slavery. Oh, sure, we pay lip service to equal opportunities for women, and we cite statistics—60 percent of women with small children are presently in the workforce, 80 percent of women with school-aged children are working—and we have all those shows on Lifetime with sensitive fathers helping to bathe the kids and fold the laundry. But unless we’re looking at people in the top echelons, somebody still has to stay home when the kids get sick, and do the dishes, and sweep the floor, and meet the school bus, and cook the dinner, and shop for the food, and buy the shoes, and cut the fingernails, and though I have no statistics on the division of fingernail-cutting duties in middle-class, two-working-parent households, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I’m fairly certain that at least nine times out of ten it’s the mothers wielding the clippers. And pouring the detergent. And mopping up the vomit instead of putting the finishing touches on that project that could have catapulted them from underling to boss, or at least from underling to less-than-underling, if only they hadn’t had to stay home to mop up the vomit. Anyway . . .” Trudy sighed. “I don’t think Adele ever adjusted to motherhood. Or to marriage. She was just going along with what she thought she was supposed to do, what our mother raised her—raised us, God help us—to do. That’s not to say she didn’t love those girls. She did, with all her heart. Have you ever heard of ‘altruistic filicide’?”
Actually, I had once run across the expression, while doing research on Andrea Yates, but I wanted to hear Trudy’s take on it. I shook my head.
“Well, it’s a theory that’s been bouncing around since the late sixties, but only recently designated as a classification for maternal filicide in conjunction with suicide. Meaning, mothers since the dawn of civilization have been murdering their children for all sorts of reasons, right? Revenge against the spouse. Jealousy or rejection. Discipline gone awry, self-defense, an unwanted child, which of course now, thank God, is mitigated, at least for some, by access to abortion and birth control, unless, of course, those assholes in Congress get their way and turn us back to the stone age. But mothers who kill themselves and their children simultaneously are in a separate category altogether: these women actually think their children will be better off dead, rather than spending the rest of their lives without a mother. Narcissistic? Of course. Delusional? You bet. But if you really think about it for a moment, it makes sense. Did you know Adele had left instructions for how she wanted the girls to be buried? She’d picked out the music, the flowers, the caterer, even the clothes she wanted the girls to wear. As if she were planning a wedding. Lily she wanted buried in a yellow and white plaid dress, which she’d picked out herself for the high holidays, even though Shep used to throw a fit every fall when Adele would suddenly remember she was Jewish and want to take the girls to shul. April—well, you knew April—she was supposed to have been buried in a pair of shorts and her Redskins jersey. As if in death Adele could finally let April be who she actually was, not who Shep or her teachers or society wanted her to be. But you know what that man did? He buried April in her First Communion dress. And my sister? Cremated. A Jew, cremated! Shep said, and this is a direct quote, ‘That woman doesn’t deserve a place in the earth for what she did.’ Now, granted, he was in mourning. And mad. But in her note, Adele had asked that she and the girls be buried together in that Jewish cemetery out in Olney. Instead, Shep buried the girls at Our Lady of Mercy under headstones engraved with crosses. At least he had a last-minute change of heart and sprinkled Adele’s ashes ove
r them. I’ll tell you one thing, I made a decision early on that I would never get married, but until that morning I got the call about Adele, I was still on the fence about motherhood. That idea died the day she killed herself. I knew, I mean I know: motherhood did her in.”
I furrowed my brow. “You don’t think her depression had anything to do with it?”
“Her depression?” She threw up her hands before landing them palms-down on the flimsy table with a bang. “Come on. You know as well as I do that her depression was a direct result of the tedium of her life. She wasn’t depressed before Shep and the kids. She had a good life. A productive and fulfilling life.”
I decided to try another tack. “What was your own mother like?”
“She was fine. Adequate. The ‘good enough mother,’ if you want to categorize her. She may have spanked us now and then, and sometimes she screamed and threw pans and threatened to do herself in—my personal favorite, for the sheer purity of its neurosis, was when she shouted, ‘I’m going to throw myself out the window, and on the way down, I’m going to yell to the neighbors that you pushed me!’—but she was a slave, okay, my father turned her into a slave. Did she love us?” Trudy shrugged her shoulders. “In her own way, sure. She loved us. She never said it, but we knew. Deep down we knew.”
“How?”
“Well, she never killed us, for one . . .” Trudy had meant it as a joke, and she started to laugh but then abruptly stopped. “Oh, I don’t know. How does anyone know she’s loved? She made us soup when we were sick. She showed up at our piano recitals. She, she . . .” She seemed to be struggling to come up with another example. “. . . She made us put on hats to go out in the snow.”
“You said your mother threatened to throw herself out the window. Did she ever try it?” I said.
Trudy was silent for a moment. “Don’t think I’m not wise to your methods. You’re trying to establish a psychological precedent for my sister’s behavior, as if there ever could be one event that were the root cause of anything. You have to understand, her suicide had nothing to do with finding my mother that day. Nothing.”
“What day? What are you talking about?”
“Oh. I thought you knew,” she said. “I wasn’t born yet, so I just know what my sister told me, but Adele was, I think, around five or six at the time. She walks into the apartment after school one day, thinks it’s empty, and goes into her bedroom and starts bouncing one of those rubber balls against the wall. It was something my mother wouldn’t let us do. So she figures if her mother’s not home, she might as well take advantage. So she’s bouncing this Spalding against the wall of the bedroom, and this is the wall that’s shared between the bathroom and the bedroom, and suddenly she hears someone yelling on the other side of the wall. ‘Stop it!’ she hears, ‘For God’s sake, stop it!’ So Adele calls out, ‘Mommy?’ and then she runs into the bathroom and finds my mother, naked, with her wrists slit, in the bathtub. You know, with the blood in the water and everything. ‘Can’t I even kill myself in peace?’ Mom says. Can you imagine? ‘Can’t I even kill myself in peace.’
“The doctor called it a cry for help, not a real suicide, because she cut across the veins, not down them, like you’re supposed to if you’re halfway serious, but of course it was scary enough for Adele. She starts screaming, ‘Don’t die, Mommy! Don’t die!’ but she said the only thing she kept thinking as she was trying to shake my mother awake was who was going to put her hair in braids every morning. She goes running down the hallway to get our neighbor, and the neighbor calls the police, and Mom’s rushed to the hospital, but she’s fine, right? And then a week later she’s back home, back braiding Adele’s hair, back at the stove, and she’s cooking kasha or something, and Adele drops a plate, and it breaks into a thousand pieces on the kitchen floor, and my mother says, ‘You should have let me die. Why didn’t you let me die?’ And Adele starts crying and picking up the pieces of broken plate with her hands, and says, ‘Because I need you, Mommy.’ Look, my father sold children’s shoes. He was no stranger to children, but he certainly didn’t know the first thing about taking care of us. Was Adele thinking about this that night in the woods in the car? About the week she ate cereal every night for dinner? I don’t know. Maybe.”
“But getting back to your mother for a moment. Clearly there was a history of maternal depression in the family—”
“Well now we’re splitting semantic hairs. You want to call it maternal depression? Go ahead. Blame the woman! Add to the canon of ‘hysterical’ females! But just think about this as you do: when a man kills, we say he snapped. We call it a crime, an aberration, an abomination, but we also consider it within the normal range of what men are capable of doing. As if a propensity for murder were encoded into their DNA, right next to pattern baldness and erectile dysfunction, just sitting there, waiting to express itself. When a woman kills, we call her crazy. Mad. Hysterical, which as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you comes from the Greek husterikos, ‘of the womb.’ Just think about that for a few minutes before you sit down in your editing room.” She pulled off her microphone and stood up. “I’m not saying her actions are excusable. They weren’t. But there are other explanations, societal influences, if you will, that lie beyond the realm of psychology.” She glanced at her watch. “Look, I’ve got to go. I have to teach a freshman seminar in half an hour. Misogyny in Literature. I’ll walk you out.”
“Oh?” I said, packing up my equipment. “Which novels do you study?”
Trudy grabbed her keys and shook her head, either in defeat or at my ignorance, I couldn’t tell. “All of them.”
CHAPTER 11
A HOMECARE NURSE, with an ample bosom and Caribbean accent, answered the door at the Bethesda home of Adele Cassidy’s psychiatrist. “May I help you?” she said. A strong smell of eucalyptus and coffee grounds emanated from the doorway, which was cracked a polite but defensive body’s-width.
“Yes, thanks,” I said. “My name’s Elizabeth Stei . . .” I caught myself. Elizabeth Steiger would never try to steal a quote from a psychiatrist. Elizabeth Burns would. “Burns. I’d like to see Dr. Sherman, if he’s free.”
“Oh, he free, alright,” the nurse smiled warmly, opening the door all the way now. “Free as a bird until eternity. Would you like to speak to the wife instead?” She motioned with her hand for me to come in.
“He died?” I’d feared as much. Thirty-five years between the crime and the investigation tends to do that.
“Yes, ma’am. He passed away three years ago. But don’t be sad . . .” The nurse was mistaking my anguished look over lost opportunity for grief. “. . . he lived a full life. Ninety-three years, eighty-nine of them with all the marbles. You can’t ask too much more from God than that, now can you?”
“No, you can’t,” I said, wondering, in fact, if you could. “You say his wife’s home though?”
“Yes. Please, come in. But speak up when you talk to Mrs. Sherman. Her hearing is not too good. Eleanor?” she yelled up the stairs. “You have a visitor.”
From atop the stairs Mrs. Sherman coughed loudly. “Fuck visitors.”
The nurse took one look at my expression and began to laugh. “Don’t mind her!” she said. “Old people, they get that way. The closer they get to the end, the more honest they be. My last employer, every morning when I come walking in, she say to me, ‘Olivia, you are so fat!’ “She laughed even harder now, her eyes crinkling with delight. “I take no offense. I am fat! So what? Eleanor, she don’t like visitors because the only visitor she ever get is her son, and when he come for a visit, they yell at each other. Go on. She don’t bite.”
I walked up the stairs and turned left toward the sound of the TV, which was tuned, loudly, to the local news. “Coming up after the break,” the announcer was saying, “A kitchen fire in a Rockville eatery leaves three dead and scores injured. We’ll have the latest on this tragic story. Plus . . .” The wail of a siren gave way to a cat’s meow. “Is your litter box safe?”
Mrs. Sherman lay in bed, surrounded by bottles of pills and lipstick-stained tumblers. The shades were drawn, the windows shut tightly against the cold, the air heavy with manufactured humidity.
“My litter box? What about Iraq, you fucking assholes? What’s happening in Iraq?” Then she noticed me and pulled up her blanket. “Who are you?”
I’d done my share of hospital volunteer work, so I was not unfamiliar with the final stages of life, but something about the scene before me now—the damp room, the stench of Pine-Sol and soiled sheets, the husk of a woman hurling insults at her TV—made me pray for a better end to my own. “Hi, Mrs. Sherman. My name’s Elizabeth Burns. I’m so sorry to—”
“Speak up. I can’t hear you.”
I raised my voice. “I said my name’s Elizabeth Burns. I’m sorry to drop by like this unannounced, but I’m looking into the suicide of a patient your husband treated in the early seventies.”
“My husband’s dead.” Mrs. Sherman seemed to take some delight in this fact.
“Yes, I know that. Your nurse told me. But I was hoping maybe he’d have talked to you about one of his—”
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