“Yes,” I said. “Something like that.”
She nodded her head. “I had a student once a few years ago, finishing up her psychoanalytic training. She was interested in the same thing. Filicidal mothers. A topic still widely under-researched and poorly understood, so I thought, great. Good for her. Why not? But the entire class turned on her, said it was impossible to empathize with such monsters.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I thought such a reaction said more about us as doctors and human beings than it did about filicidal mothers. I don’t want to discourage you even further, because obviously I think the issue deserves closer scrutiny, and I can sense your excitement at chipping away at it, but I’d be careful if I were you,” she warned. “You’re treading into waters most people either can’t or won’t go.”
I’D ALSO MADE several attempts at writing a letter to Shep Cassidy, but I’d get to the second paragraph, read over what I’d written, and cringe. “Dear Mr. Cassidy,” I wrote. “Thirty-five years ago you lost your family, and I lost my best friend.” No. Too purple. Then this: “Dear Mr. Cassidy, I’m a journalist hoping to make a documentary about the death of your wife and children in 1972, and I would like to sit down with you, during the next few weeks, to shoot an interview.” No. Too clinical. I’d never before had a crisis of conscience convincing the bereaved to talk, but this time the whole idea felt unseemly, wrong.
There’s a famous story, passed down from journalist to journalist, about the TV reporter who one day showed up in a camp full of violated nuns during the first Congo War and called out, “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” It’s a story which never fails to amuse both journalists and non-journalists alike, but its comedic power over the former lies not in its slapstick absurdity, but rather in its too-close-for-comfort, self-loathing familiarity: Anyone here been raped and speak English? Anyone here lost his entire family and want to spew into my video camera? I couldn’t get past it.
Then one night, as I sorted through the pile of mail, I came across a letter with a return address, handwritten, which made me jump.
I tore it open. And read the following:
7865 Thorn Apple Way
Potomac, MD 20854
February 27, 2007
Miss Elizabeth Burns
151 West 85th Street, #2A
New York, NY 10024
Dear Miss (Mrs.?) Burns:
It has come to my attention, from my friend Mavis Traub, that you have been looking into the death of my wife and children, so you can put it on TV. Needful to say, I was upset at first by hearing about your show, and while I’m not going to ask you to cease and desist it, I will ask that you listen to what I have to say, human to human.
If you are, as you told Mavis, a friend of April’s from elementary school, you must know that she left this world for the next thirty-five years ago. I’m surprised you remember my little girl, being close to her age, since she died so young, but I’m willing to suspend belief and say, okay, maybe she did know April, but does that give you the right to write about her? I’m not saying you don’t have the right, only look deep into your own soul and ask if you do have the right. When that poor man Rusty Yates lost his five children in the bathtub, I kept thinking, well at least on top of everything else I didn’t have to deal with Katie Couric. I even wrote him a letter, telling him how sorry I was for his tragedy and giving him my phone number in case he felt like talking to someone who could actually understand him instead of pretending to.
I’ve spent these past thirty-five years trying to understand what happened to my family, and I still haven’t figured out why. I thought about selling the house and moving to North Carolina when it first happened, because my sister and her family live there, and my company has a branch office I could work out of, but over the years I came to understand that this house is my cross to bare. I need to live here and suffer through it because God is testing me. He’s testing me like he tested Job, and he’s asking me to look deep inside myself, deep into every corner of my house to figure out what went wrong here, so I can ask forgiveness for my sins.
Just so we’re clear, this letter is off the record, and if, after you finish reading it, you still want to make your TV show about my family, well, I guess I can’t stop you, but I will sue you if any word from this letter appears. But, because I’m trying to show you good faith, in the hopes that this good faith will sway you not to make your film, I will tell you the few things I do know, for your own curiosity’s sake. For example, I’ve already figured out some things I could have done different. Father Joseph, he’s my priest, has been helping me to see things more clearly. He made me realize that I have a bad temper, and this probably made my wife scared. But my father had a bad temper and his father before him, too, so I know I came to mine honestly. Father Joseph also taught me to realize that since Adele was of the Jewish persuasion, we probably shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place, or I should have insisted, like I many times tried to, that she convert. If she had converted to Catholicism, she would have understood that killing herself and her children would make her go to hell, and she wouldn’t have done it. I believe that with the fullness of my heart.
I also know that my relationship with Mrs. Traub was foolhardy and a sin. She told me she didn’t tell you about it, since you were recording her with a video camera, but I have faced my inner demons and if I can confess to both God and Father Joseph my own guilt then I can confess to anyone that I tasted of that fruit, and I regret it. Deeply regret it. But I will also say this: a man can only take so much neglect inside his house before he starts looking outside of it. If Adele had kept to her end of the bargain, if she’d tried to be a good wife, things would not have gone where they went. And I believe that to this day. Like Father Joseph says, a branch can only bend so far before it breaks.
The thing is, too, I had no idea my wife had such difficult problems in her psychology. When I met her, she was my nurse at Holy Cross. I know you might find that hard to believe, because of what happened, but I tell you she had a way about her that was so caring, any man would have melted. I fell in love with her even as she was sticking my arm with a needle. In fact, maybe because of the way she stuck in the needle. Not like some nurses, who don’t even tell you they’re about to do it, they just stick it in when they think you’re not looking, but gentle. Real gentle. I got better fast just to be able to ask her out on a date, and we were married soon after. A few years later, the girls came along.
Adele was never the same after that. After the girls, that is. It’s like she became possessed or something, overnight. She stopped smiling. She stopped caring about herself, you know, eating whole boxes of cupcakes out of the box and forgetting to take a bath and sleeping all day and whatnot. One day she asked me to get rid of the knives, because she was afraid she’d do something with them. I kept saying, What Adele? What would you do with the knives, but she just said, something bad and walked out of the kitchen. I got rid of the knives, the big ones at least, not the steak knives because we needed them for steak, but by God one day I came home from work and Adele had a scratch on her arm that looked exactly like it was made with a steak knife, even though she said she cut it on a fence, and so I got rid of them, too.
But I didn’t think to get rid of the vacuum hose. Father Joseph tells me I couldn’t have known, that I can’t blame myself, but sometimes I feel like if I’d just thought of getting rid of that hose, my family would still be with me today.
Look, I don’t know you, so I can’t possibly know your intentions, but even if you have the best intentions and even if you are the best journalist in the world, how do you think you’ll be able to explain the story of my wife if I still don’t have a clue why it happened and I was married to her? I ask you to please just take the time to think about that for awhile before going ahead with your documentary.
I’d also like to ask you to, just for a minute, try to put yourself in my shoes. How would you feel if I turned on
a video camera and started asking your friends and neighbors all sorts of personal questions about you and your family so I could put it on TV for everyone to see? I know that’s your job, and I’m glad there are still people out there digging up the dirt on the politicians and whatnot, and if you ask me they should be digging up a lot more dirt these days with what’s going on in the news, but why should my life be microscoped just because I lost my family? People lose their families every day, for all sorts of reasons, and I think we should all be left alone to deal with our griefs in private. I’m not a celebrity. I’ve never run for office. I sell pipes for a living, and I won’t even be selling them for much longer. I retire in three months, with a decent pension. Enough to keep me going for however many more years I’ve got left until I’m finally allowed to be reunited with my little girls up in heaven, if God will even let me in up there, which I have my doubts about even though Father Joseph assures me I’ll make it. I’m an old man now. An old man with some big regrets who had a tragedy happen to him a long time ago and would like to keep it there, in the past, where it belongs. I go to church every Sunday, I give money to charity, I do all the things a decent man is supposed to do. Am I perfect? Of course not. I still drink too much on occasion, and I still have a bit of a temper, especially when an order gets screwed up at work. I curse, and I covet, and I take the name of the Lord in vain more often than I should, and once upon a time, when I wasn’t paying close enough attention, my family disappeared. I’m not proud of my behavior back then, and I know I wasn’t really listening to what Adele had to say, because I guess I just couldn’t believe that a mother could worry about sticking knives into herself or her children, and I will go to my grave wondering how I could have done things different, but that does not mean I want a stranger to pick apart my family and what I did or didn’t do looking for someone to blame. I’m betting you have things you’d like to keep hidden, too. Things you’re not so proud of either, stuff you’ve said that you wished you didn’t, moments you wish you could redo if clocks went backwards but they don’t.
So please, for my sake, for the sake of my late wife and children, whom I loved more than life itself, let sleeping dogs sleep. If you really want to honor April’s memory, if you really want to do her justice, let her rest in peace.
Cordially yours,
Shepherd H. Cassidy
I folded the letter back up again and slipped it into its envelope, my heart pounding. So, I thought, that’s that. One less element with which to tell the story.
I thought about Mark: what would he write about us, about me, if I were to meet the same fate as Adele, and he were composing a letter to a nosy journalist thirty-five years hence? Did he even realize how miserable I was, playing house all alone?
Every night since Tess asked about our possible divorce, I’d called him at work and asked him to please come home. “I have something I need to talk to you about, and I don’t want to do it over the phone,” I’d say. “Please, it’s important.”
To which he’d promise to leave within the hour, which would invariably turn into two; by the time he’d finally walk in the door, shouting, “Z! I’m home! You awake?” I would have already fallen asleep, still propped up in bed with the lights on and a book on my chest. How was I going to get him to commit to trying to fix our broken marriage, I wondered, if I couldn’t even find the time to ask him to do so? The whole endeavor seemed hopeless, absurd, like trying to make a documentary about a thirty-five-year-old crime without the participation of the key witness. I couldn’t help wondering if Mark and I wouldn’t have more open lines of communication if we were officially separated, instead of just separated by default. At least then we’d have to actually spend time talking to one another, if only to discuss who would get the kids and when.
“Adultery,” Dr. Rivers had explained to me, after I kept obsessing over what had happened with Renzo, “is usually a symptom of unmet needs, not a sign, necessarily, that you should call it quits.” She’d asked me, as an exercise, to list the things I presently loved or had once loved about Mark, and I was surprised to hear myself yammering on for nearly half of our session about his attributes: his calm in the face of adversity; his pitch-perfect sense of humor; his excellent fathering skills, when he was actually around; the fact that I was still very much physically attracted to him, despite everything going wrong in our bedroom. Then I recounted, thinking as I did about Renzo’s nonchalance toward his own impending fatherhood, the day of Daisy’s birth, how the entire east side, from Murray Hill to Fifty-ninth Street, had been gridlocked due to visiting dignitaries at the UN, and yet Mark had arrived in the delivery room, sweaty and panting, no more than a half hour after my call, having sprinted the thirty-four blocks between his office at CUNY and New York Hospital. “Seems to me those are things that are worth fighting for,” Dr. Rivers had said. And I’d left her office that day determined to do so.
But it had been a week since that resolution, and I’d yet to make any headway.
Enough, I thought.
I picked up the phone. “Mark, please come home,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
I could hear the usual tap-tap of his keyboard in the background, the hollow buzz of the speaker phone. “Sweetheart, I can’t,” he said. His voice had the tinny echo of a 1930s radio broadcast. “I’m having some real structural issues here with my data mining. The whole project is on the verge of collapse.”
So is our marriage! I wanted to scream, but I was determined to make my case—quietly, and without tossing his speakerphone across the room—in person. “What time do you think you’ll be leaving?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I really gotta go.”
When he hung up, I weighed my limited options. Then I called down to Astrid and asked her if she wouldn’t mind coming up. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”
“Where are you going at this hour?” she asked, her left eyebrow raised into a question mark. She propped her slippered feet up on the old trunk we used for a coffee table and started flipping through the channels on the remote.
“To the SoHo Grand. I answered one of those ads on Craigslist?”
“No way!” she squealed. “A friend of mine from college did that. He wanted a woman for a threesome with his wife. Now the wife’s living with the woman, and he has custody of the kids. Total mess. I’d be careful, if I were you.”
“Astrid!” I hit her lightly on her head with Tess’s homework folder, which I’d rescued from the floor. “I was joking.” I shoved the folder in her backpack and spied a Ziploc bag filled with mold-encrusted apple wedges, the odor and sight of which made me heave. “Ugh. That’s where the smell was coming from! I keep telling her to clean out her backpack, but she—”
“Never does. Give it up. She never will. Mine are taller than me, and they still leave their rotting shit around everywhere when they come home from college. So where are you going then?”
I tossed the moldy apple into an empty plastic bag and tied the handles tight. “Astrid,” I said, trying to make my voice sound throaty and southern, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, “I’m going to the mountain.”
“Huh?”
“You know, if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must—”
“Go to the mountain. Got it. Good for you, Elizabeth. Give him my regards. Tell him I talked to Diego about fixing that flap of carpet on the stairs, but he said Weintraub won’t pay for it.” She bypassed several stations showing the latest suicide bombings in Baghdad and stopped on channel 34, the E! True Hollywood Story of some young actor born the year I graduated high school. “And if you get there and he’s schtupping his partner’s secretary in the kitchenette, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. Can you believe this guy? Barely out of diapers, and he’s fucking what’s-her-name. You think she gets Botox?”
I glanced at the TV. The middle-aged actress in question was walking down one red carpet or another with her young sire, looking like a wax version of herself. “
What do you think?”
“I think what’s missing from my life is a teenage boy and a little botulism.”
I smiled. Stole a peek at the kitchen clock. It was just after ten. “Look, if the girls wake up, which they shouldn’t, just give them a glass of water—no juice, Daisy had two cavities last time we were at the dentist—and tell them I’ll be back in an hour, okay?” I pointed out the open bottle of wine on the kitchen counter which, should she not drink it, would go to waste. Then I thanked her, profusely, for coming up at the last minute.
“Hey, what are friends for?” she said. She stood up and hugged me. “You deserve a break. Speaking of which, how’s that thing you’re working on?”
“Huh?”
“The thing thing. About your friend whose mother—”
“Oh that,” I said, feeling the sting of Shep’s letter afresh. “Not so well. I got a letter today from the woman’s husband asking me to cease and desist.”
“Shit. I’m sorry about that. You seemed so excited about making it.”
“Yeah, well. C’est la vie, right? Anyway, I should be back soon. Thanks again. Really.” I wrapped a scarf around my neck and fished my hat out of the closet.
I took the B train down to Forty-second Street, trudging through the slush to the corner of Forty-fifth and Sixth, where Lortex had its main headquarters. The normally bustling streets of midtown were mostly empty, with only the random briefcasetoter turning up the lapels of his overcoat or hailing a taxi.
The guard at the desk asked to see my ID. “Go on up, Mrs. Steiger,” he said, handing me a visitor’s pass without calling up. Eight taunting bars of Muzak Manilow later (“I can’t laugh, and I can’t sing, I’m finding it hard to do anything . . .”), I reached the twenty-third floor and walked down the darkened corridor toward Mark’s office, the only one illuminated from within. Through his glass wall, from afar, I could see him sitting on his ergonomically designed swivel chair, staring at his computer, glancing back and forth between the screen and something on his desk.
Between Here and April Page 18