Policewoman

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  The man near the sink glanced quickly at another of the husbands, who was sitting on the edge of the window sill: a dark-faced man with thick curly hair, who lifted his chin slightly and squinted his eyes and ran his tongue along his full lower lip. The man near the sink looked down again at his feet, then looked up, directly into my eyes. His cheeks seemed to darken and he dropped his eyes.

  I thought of the beautiful Annamarie as they hissed the words of their story: fifteen years old and slender with black curls and flashing eyes. I saw these strong and masculine and lusty men, sitting here in this room with their women, these youthless young women in their late thirties or early forties who had no shining thing about them. I looked at the third husband, who was leaning against the doorjamb, lighting a new cigarette from the stub of his old one, a strong man, as the other two were strong, with work-blackened hands and a hard mouth.

  “And the boy?” the lieutenant asked.

  She had the boy, this little angel, and it killed Guido, really killed him, for the boy was born right upstairs. One Tuesday, the boy was born, and two days later—it was six, yes, six years ago—on a Thursday, Guido died of heartbreak. And the old woman, in her grief and shame, sent the girl out the day her father died.

  I spoke so unexpectedly that even I was surprised. “Sent the girl out? Sent her out where?”

  The woman who had been speaking turned a hard, shrewd face toward me, then shrugged her shoulders and spread her hands. “Out. Out to the street, where she belonged!”

  Lieutenant Storenoff’s little eyes were fixed on my face. Without saying a word or changing his stony expression, he warned me; I pressed my lips together and said nothing.

  “And the child?” he prompted softly.

  Ah, the child was evil and bad; from the beginning the child had been cursed. The Dumb One, they called him: he never spoke a word. His head was large but not with brains, and wobbly, and dropped from side to side. And he never had a name, not that they knew of, just the Dumb One, for that was what he was.

  I wondered which of the women were married to which of the men, tried to match them up, pair them off. But they looked incredibly alike: shapeless and gray with heavy, unwashed hair pulled back behind their ears with bobby pins: large, strong, meaningless faces that seemed to blur without expression; stubby strong hands, rough and red as men’s hands. I knew they had been studying me; I had felt the cold, hate-filled glances exchanged between them and I tried to breathe steadily and slowly, to control the rhythmic, sudden waves of despair that rushed through my body like blood. They were some ancient race of women who feed on damnation and ruin of the young and the beautiful, who wet their lips and teeth over the destruction of beauty, and nod and cross themselves and crack their knuckles and squint their eyes in pleasure, as though in some long-awaited revenge and justification. And their men were present with them, but not of them. No man looked at his woman when she spoke, no eyes were meeting, no feeling shared. They were separate and apart and not of each other. I knew what the strange hidden tones in their voices were as they related the tragedy to us: some terrible dull kind of joy and triumph. They had prevailed. The beautiful Annamarie was vanquished and the devil-child was dead.

  When one stopped speaking another began, but it was the same voice telling the story with the same insistent monotonous tone. He would not learn, that one. She tried to teach him, the poor old woman, burdened now with this one in her old age. Sixty-four and raised six good children, and all gone away now and married. This was her gift in her old age, this one that slobbered and moaned and howled all night. But she tried, the Virgin is her witness, she tried. She was not a strong woman, always with the pains in her shoulders, and why not, dragging that great fat one up the four steep flights of stairs day after day. Taking him to the playground, putting him with the children so that he might learn to play. But the children hit him and threw him to the ground and spat upon him, and the old woman would pull him up and make him stand, and tell him to hit back, and punch him, to show him. But he would lie down and howl and ruin his clothing, the stupid one.

  I lifted my head, felt words in my mouth, but Lieutenant Storenoff stopped me cold, as though anticipating me, and I said nothing, holding this thing down inside of me, forcing it back and down. I felt a terrible, growing, aching pain, and then an urgent, dreadful need to run from this room, this building, this world of theirs to the night streets, to any place where the air was cold and pure, away from these death-chanters.

  No, she could not leave the Dumb One alone—not for a minute. Always, he had to be with her. One time, she had tried to leave him, so that she could visit some friends. She had tied him with a long rope to the bed, so that he could move around but not get out, not get into trouble. But somehow he had broken the rope—he was very strong—and he had gotten into the front room and found the matches and set fire to the curtains, and the husband of one of the women had rushed up the stairs and put out the fire, or they all would have died.

  The woman sitting directly across from me turned and nodded vigorously toward the man leaning against the sink, and he looked at the ceiling, nodding only slightly, and made a clicking sound with his tongue against his front teeth and dug his shoe into the floor.

  And when the old woman came home, later that night, she cried and screamed, she was so upset. The curtains were all black, and there was water all over the front room. She screamed and the Dumb One moaned, and the old woman took a match and lit it and held it to his palm to try to teach him. To try to teach him. Then she handed the stupid one the matches, and didn’t he try to light one? They had all taught their own children this way, and their own children would never touch matches.

  Ignoring the lieutenant, who had focused his gaze on me, I asked: “You burned your children’s hands?”

  The women stopped speaking, pulled the sleeves of their heavy sweaters and blinked vacantly, and there was a heavy, resentful silence in the small yellowish room.

  “And tonight,” the lieutenant asked, “what happened tonight?”

  Their narrative had been broken; they shrugged heavily, staring at their hands. The lieutenant sighed, then took out a long cigar and motioned with it toward his mouth for permission. The woman whose home it was nodded and got up and brought him an ash tray. The man by the sink reached, into a cupboard over his head and brought out an unmarked bottle of wine.

  Would the lieutenant like some homemade wine? The lieutenant had a small glass of homemade wine, and the man gave me some of the deep red liquid in a small, dirty juice glass. His fingers touched mine as he handed me the glass; his eyes were like glittering beads, sliding down my face and down the length of my body to my legs and ankles and back to my knees. He stood against the sink again, drinking a water glass of the wine, surveying me openly with an amused expression, for his wife’s back was to him.

  “And tonight,” the lieutenant said, “the boy upset her tonight?”

  Ah, tonight, last night, a thousand nights for six years of nights the boy had upset her: this devil with the stubborn body that could feel nothing, but could eat the food and outgrow the clothes the old woman had to sew for him.

  Tonight, yes. He spilled the coffee.

  “Spilled the coffee?”

  The woman ignored me and spoke only to the lieutenant. It was the old woman’s only pleasure, the coffee. And she shared it with that one. She made a fresh pot every morning, and they drank it for breakfast and lunch and then at night. The boy had been bad that day, as always. Not watching where he walked, falling into the gutter and cutting his hand and ripping his sleeve, not caring. It never hurt him. He had no feelings. And then he had fallen down the stairs and pulled the old woman with him, and all of her packages had fallen. The boy had sat on the steps instead of helping her to pick the things up. He had sat down and pushed his fingers into the eggs and laughed, and the old woman had had to climb down the stairs and pick up the things. And then, when they got inside, he had begun to scream, and there had been much
noise and he had spilled the coffee.

  “How do you know he spilled the coffee?” the lieutenant asked.

  Everyone knew: you could hear. The old woman had a very loud voice, and it had been a bad day for her. She screamed it over and over again, as though she couldn’t stop the words from coming from her lips. Over and over again she screamed that he had spilled the coffee.

  “And then what happened?” he asked.

  And the women rolled their eyes and shrugged and crossed themselves. What happened then? Why, who would know? There was much screaming and much noise and much terrible sound. And then it was quiet.

  And then it was quiet.

  “And then what happened?” the lieutenant asked in a quiet chanting way, as children ask the storyteller.

  And then the old woman had knocked on a neighbor’s door.

  The woman sitting on the edge of the upholstered chair nodded and glanced at the man standing against the doorjamb.

  And the neighbor and her husband went upstairs with the old woman. And then they called the police. And that was all.

  And that was all.

  There was an inaudible general sigh in the room from the three women. There it was, all told, and that was all, and their lips were shut now and their eyebrows were raised expectantly.

  I didn’t hear the lieutenant’s words, just the soft, even hum of his voice. I stood up because I realized that he was leaving, and I turned for some reason before I left the flat. The man leaning against the sink grinned and winked, behind his wife’s back, and made an obscene gesture at me with his hands.

  When we entered the old woman’s flat, I did not sit down but stared at the floor near where the army blanket lay, and noticed for the first time the dark, still damp stain of the spilled coffee.

  Lieutenant Storenoff had his back to me and I didn’t hear him, but apparently he had said something, for he turned facing me, looking down at me, his face still and blank.

  “I said, go in there and search the prisoner.”

  I rubbed my hands together convulsively, trying to find something to hold onto. “I can’t. I’m sorry, lieutenant, but I’m going to be sick.”

  I could feel the blood draining from my face and the cold lightheaded sickness and the beads of perspiration on my mouth and cheeks. His voice was an odd mixture of anger and softness, and he suddenly grasped my arm with his powerful hand and pulled me toward the sink. He bent over, still holding my arm, and pulled the blanket back from the child’s body, then released my arm and straightened up.

  “Listen,” he said. “Listen, this is a corpse. Dead. Without feeling or anything else, just a dead thing. Whether it was six years old or seventy or hacked to death or beaten to death or poisoned or died of natural causes, right now it is absolutely nothing. This is when we get it: when it doesn’t matter any more.”

  I stared at the side of the child’s face, the heavy cheek lying in the thick blood, and then at the bitten, ragged nails of the child who felt nothing, had not experienced pain, was too stupid. The lieutenant drew back his foot and kicked the body roughly, and I felt a cry and stared at him in horror.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, his eyes not blinking. “Now, I don’t know how long you’ve been a cop or how long you intend to stay one, but the Bureau sent you over here and your job now is to go in and search that female prisoner. Go and be sick if you have to, and then when you’re finished, go and search her.”

  I could not get the sickness from my stomach. It was down too far, in my legs, and rising into my chest. I pressed my shoulder as hard as I could against the corrugated tin wall of the narrow closetlike enclosure where the toilet was, saw an ancient calendar on the wall, decorated with yellow roses.

  I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, needing to feel something, some distinct, actual, real pain, some sign of my own existence. When I left the cubicle, Lieutenant Storenoff turned to me and said softly, “Listen, Miss ... What’s your first name?” I told him. “Listen, Dorothy. When you leave here tonight, it’s all over. Finished. You leave and you forget it.”

  I nodded, but I knew he was wrong. It was what they all were telling me: you forget it. But I had felt the insistent little pieces of memory pushing inside of me all night. The sensations and special combination of odors, the tone of voice, the inflections, the gestures, the special haze of yellow light. I knew they were stored, unrelated, in some compartment of my brain. I knew that all my life they would appear before me, unexpectedly, in different places, at different times, and would conjure up this house, this world, these people. He was wrong, but I knew that the words had cost him something, and so I nodded and entered the bedroom.

  The old woman stared up dumbly at me as I motioned for her to rise. I avoided the old woman’s face and quickly ran my hands under her clothing. The woman had nothing on her body but her age: all the days and nights and years of her life, filling her with a musty, stale and deathly odor.

  “A big black man, miss, he beata the boy. He beata the boy, God help him.”

  The woman sat down on the bed again, rocking her body back and forth, her feet dangling two inches from the floor. Seeing those two feet, swollen and hanging in space, apart and separate from the terribleness of the woman, I felt I did not want to see them, did not want to feel the senseless, irrational pity the sight of those old feet drew forth. I wanted to see the strong old hands that could beat a helpless, demented child to death, not the tired, misshapen, old and helpless feet of an old woman who had borne seven children and was now here, alone, holding her ancient body and moaning and praying in some monotonous liturgy to her ideal of all motherhood. I looked at the woman’s face, wanting to despise her, needing to despise her, looked for the signs of loathsomeness. Instead I saw an old and creased and ignorant face, blackened with time and sunken with rotten teeth, twitching in prayer and bewilderment. The colorless eyes were swimming in tears which cut jagged paths down the sallow cheeks. I went back to the front room and said to the lieutenant: “Nothing. Nothing on her.”

  He nodded and turned to a slim, dark-haired man who had just arrived. “This is Detective Navarra. Get the old woman in here.”

  I approached the woman and touched her shoulder lightly with my hand, not looking at her, and made a gesture toward the front room. The old woman got to the floor and hobbled into the front room, and the Italian-speaking detective pulled out a chair for her. She sat down heavily.

  “Now, tell us, Mama; no one here will hurt you. Tell us what happened here tonight.”

  The old woman, hearing the soft-voiced words of her own language, looked at the detective and then around the room, and then at the Virgin with the fat child in her arms. Then she shrieked, her voice the ripping, tearing, cutting sound of an animal in desperate pain. Over and over she shrieked some words, holding her body in her arms and beseeching the slightly cross-eyed Virgin.

  Lieutenant Storenoff stood unblinking, unmoving, watching the woman. Suddenly, the screaming stopped and with a wordless gasp the old woman threw herself to the floor and crept under the sink and pulled the blanket back and began petting and kissing the dead child. When they pulled her back onto the chair, she was holding on to the dirty piece of rag, shaped vaguely like a doll, which she had taken from the dead child’s hand. She petted and caressed the doll with a hand wet with blood.

  “What did she say?” Lieutenant Storenoff asked.

  The Italian-speaking detective took a deep breath and his voice seemed shaky. “She said: ‘I have killed the child, and he was flesh of my flesh.’”

  Lieutenant Storenoff blinked once, his eyes closing completely, like a cat or an owl, but he did not move or nod. Then, opening his eyes, he motioned to me. “All right, officer, you and the patrolman take her to the precinct. Detective Navarra, you go, too. The M.E. will be here in a few minutes, and I’ll be down within an hour. And, Miss Uhnak, I phoned your office, so you’re covered.”

  I touched the woman’s arm, my fingers trembling at the narrowness of
the bones beneath the grayish-black eternal mourning sleeve of her dress. The old woman looked up at me, startled, then at Navarra, who told her in Italian to come and not be frightened.

  As we reached the door, Lieutenant Storenoff called out sharply, his voice louder and harsher than I had heard it. “Wait a minute,” he said. Then he walked to us, and without a word he wrenched the small piece of rag from the woman’s hand. The woman recoiled with a short cry of terror or anguish, and her arms reached out and her body shuddered; I held her, or she would have sunk to the floor.

  Lieutenant Storenoff, without looking at us, walked to the sink and pulled the blanket back, placed the rag doll under the child’s hand and recovered the body carefully. Then he turned to us.

  He stood scowling for a second, looking directly at me. Then his features rearranged themselves; he adjusted the mask of blankness and lifted an arm at us. “Go ahead,” he said softly. “Get going.”

  6

  “A terrible thing was done to me”

  THERE IS A RHYTHM and a cadence to police work. There are long slow weeks when the eight-hour tour seems empty beyond endurance, when you hear about other people’s excitements and accomplishments and encounters, and you have the feeling that you are plodding through mud, that whatever it was you were supposed to learn, to do, to partake of, is lost and gone, not to happen. Then, it changes. Something happens, some investigation, some arrest, and the tempo picks up with lightning speed. It always seems to happen in cycles—you make one arrest and you get hot, and one seems to follow the other.

  In the long routine stretches between the activity, the faces of people become a blur, their voices a low and monotonous moan of complaints. This was done to me. Where were the police? I was never so shocked, I was never so outraged, I was never so frightened. And you look at the people and listen to their stories and take down their words and turn them into the dry, official investigation reports that state the who-what-where-when. You learn to listen to the words without any sense of surprise. This thing has happened before, and as the inspector had told us, this thing will happen again. Soon none of the stories are new, so quickly have they become familiar and recognizable.