Policewoman

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  A Brooklyn slum is like any other slum and a Brooklyn tenement is like any other tenement and a Negro ghetto is like any other Negro ghetto. Durkee took my arm as we trailed the others. “Don’t touch the walls,” he said. “Roaches.”

  They pounded on the door, and a small, thin, dark girl, her eyes wide and black, stood back, wordlessly, and let us all enter. She didn’t look at the prisoner, Thomas Anderson, age 22, male, Negro, born U.S. She was neither surprised nor excited nor upset, but leaned silently against a wall, watching, not really seeing. Her husband sat on the edge of a low chair, its broken upholstery showing cottony gaps. The place was a series of tiny rooms that were wider than they were long. There was a separate boxlike kitchen, with a bathtub taking up one wall. There were pots and dishes everywhere, and four big black cockroaches were scrambling up the side of the old-fashioned refrigerator. Durkee pointed and pulled me back. The girl, no more than seventeen, came into the kitchen. She was swollen with child, her face puffy with that mask of expectation.

  They had told her they were looking for jewelry or pawn tickets. “Did he ever give you things like that?” Durkee asked. “Presents?”

  “The only thing he ever give me was this,” she answered, looking down at her body and resting her folded arms on its round fullness.

  The other detective, Davis, came into the kitchen. “You got two TV sets, Mrs. Anderson, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “and owe on both of them.”

  They went around the place collecting tickets, a few odd pieces of jewelry, a cheap watch, a costume pin. Durkee went into the darkness of the other room and then we were alone, the girl and I, and she was motionless and unquestioning. She hadn’t even asked what her husband had done.

  “When are you going to have the baby?” I asked.

  She jerked one shoulder. “I dunno.”

  “Well, have you made any arrangements? I mean, what hospital will you go to?”

  She shrugged again. “I dunno.”

  Her eyes were round and large and showed the fear that her blank, young, loose features had concealed. A moment passed, was shared, and I wanted to say something to her. “Look,” I said weakly, for it had no meaning. “Look, I’m sorry.” About what, I don’t know. About her husband, sure to get at least twenty years; about her baby, to be born somewhere, sometime soon, to be returned to this hovel, these dark and filthy and ratty rooms. But that’s what I said, and the girl pushed out her lip and narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

  “Whut you care?” she asked. “Whut’s it mean to you?”

  You’re right: it doesn’t mean a damn thing to me, not any of it, none of it, not you or your husband or your child or your life. It has nothing to do with me. And I will forget you and your swollen body and his eyes and twitching face and my own coldness, and none of this can touch me, because I am as cold as ice and incapable of being touched. Not by you or any of them. I am hard as stone and devoid of feeling, because this is how you have to be: this is your only defense.

  9

  “You have become famous and your face is known”

  I WILL NEVER BELIEVE anything I read in the newspapers or hear on radio or see in the so-called news broadcasts on television. I know that it is all a game and that they take a person and shape and define and manipulate that person into whatever form or dimension suits the immediate needs or purposes of the media. I know that an event is plastic and that truth as extended to the public is lurking somewhere between all the words. I know this because it was done to me. There was a lull in sensational news at the time I apprehended the mugger of Fulton Street, and so the case was headlined and featured for as many days as it could be milked and stretched—until the next outline of an event came along to replace my exploits and my public image.

  The director of policewomen informed me, in her office, that I was to be promoted to detective third grade. I was surprised, because departmental policy dictates against what is called “on-the-spot” promotions, for what I believe is a good reason. A sudden, single act of good police work is often performed by an officer at a moment of confrontation, but this does not necessarily indicate that the officer should be promoted; it is often a fluke. I went through the ceremonies at City Hall, seeing the mayor and the police commissioner and the collected crowds in the same kind of unnatural calmness that had gripped me through the days following the arrest of Anderson. It was only later, at home, holding the coveted “gold shield” in the palm of my hand, that I began to feel any real emotions.

  “I deserved this shield,” I said to Tony, who smiled.

  “Of course you did,” he said.

  “No.” I shook my head. “That isn’t what I mean. I deserved it before this. This is a ‘headline shield’—a forced promotion. They didn’t have any choice. They should have given it to me months ago on the basis of my past work. My record is good. I have enough pinches and convictions to have merited this a long time ago. I wouldn’t have gotten this promotion if it hadn’t been for all the publicity.”

  To pacify me, he said that it didn’t matter: I did get the promotion, and the Honorable Mention Award which entitled me to membership in the Police Honor Legion. It was the highest honor a police officer could attain.

  I saw my picture on the front pages of the morning papers and in the second section of the afternoon papers: a smiling girl confidently holding onto the arm of the large, dark prisoner; a grinning policewoman saluting the mayor, regarding the new detective shield with pride. It was all fake. All the words written by the featured columnists and the lighthearted admiration of three editors of the city’s biggest newspapers: JUST ROUTINE, SAYS LITTLE LADY COP! DOROTHY’S LITTLE, BUT OH MY! NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF A WOMAN! They told the story of the assignment, shifting the facts and details around for greater interest, describing my astonishing feats of judo: “Dorothy tossed the amazed Anderson with a combination of three basic judo holds [and they had pictures of me demonstrating, as I had been told to do] and flattened him with a karate slash; had him handcuffed and half unconscious to be delivered to her admiring partner.” And there was a picture of my admiring partner, his eyes popping, regarding me wildly, as I regarded the camera with a wooden grin.

  I sat with the newspaper men, each in turn, each entitled according to the police department’s public relations department to an exclusive interview, and I answered the questions coolly and carefully. I had been briefed and instructed. Not exactly warned and admonished, but the sharp, shrewd eyes of the director of policewomen sensed some vague and resentful stubbornness in my silence at her instructions.

  “You understand, of course, Mrs. Uhnak,” she intoned, “that in giving these interviews you are the spokesman for 250 policewomen. Your words are our words, and this is a heavy responsibility.”

  So I was told: Don’t be yourself; you are to be the image of us. It was that about it all that I felt most heavily. You stop being an individual. You have no personal identity. To have said, “Yes, I was afraid. I was as scared as any woman would be under the circumstances,” would have been to negate the public image of the police. We must remain inhuman and separate and apart, another species. Facing death is no more than a routine thing which we were trained and paid to do.

  The television shows were worse, much worse. I was sent to two early morning news broadcasts. I had to arrive at one studio in the dark of night, though it was five-thirty in the morning. I sat and watched this man, tall and smooth and grinning at an hour when any normal man would still be pulling the covers over his head. He ran through his scheduled joviality and introduced a group of ten short, muscular, inarticulate young wrestlers from an assorted collection of country-wide boys’ clubs; they were in New York to compete at some show at Madison Square Garden. These Neanderthal little runts sputtered and stammered and hitched up their pants and made their tough little monkey faces into the camera, the color draining from their faces, as the M.C. feigned fright at their potential strength. And during the pre-broadcast run-through,
sitting on the side, I listened to an immaculately groomed social arbitrator, some elegant man who had written various books about the inside of upper society, as he regaled me with what he considered fascinatingly offbeat material about names with hyphens that meant nothing to me. Then he raised his handsome arched eyebrows and, as if in afterthought, asked me who I was, seeking my right or reason for sharing this stage with him, I was obviously not a member of that little group of wary young musclemen. It stuck in my throat. I murmured that I was a policewoman, and he drew back slightly. “Good heavens,” he said, not quite knowing how to cope with this bit of information. “And what have you done?” Apparently, I had not made the society page.

  I shrugged slightly. “Nothing much, this is just an assignment,” and his interest, which had been migratory, waned as he launched into some story about third-rate royalty and Palm Beach.

  The show was taped, and after his portion of it, he wiped his forehead and whispered to me, “As soon as it’s run off, I have to call my wife; she’ll tell me how I did. Listen, how did it seem to you?” It struck me as odd that he was looking for some sort of acceptance from me—perhaps he was just democratic at heart.

  When I was interviewed, the man running the show, a sweet-faced fellow with a Midwestern accent who kept calling me “Dor’thy,” kept shaking his head. At one point he actually reached out to squeeze my muscle.

  “My goodness, Dor’thy,” he gushed, “you seem so little,” as though I were shrinking down before his eyes. He made me stand up to his six-foot-three inches of lank and bone, and I spoke in a flat, monotonous litany, telling my story by rote. He kept trying to liven it up with gasps and groans and “my goodnesses” at every pause, and I felt a little sorry for him. We waited until the show was run off, watching it on the monitor, and the social expert ran and made his call, then came back, slightly agitated.

  “My wife,” he said accusingly, “said that you came over much better than I did. She said I fidget. Heavens, I never knew I was fidgeting. Did you detect any fidgets?” I told him no, but he took no comfort from this. Then the group of wrestlers, eying me like some future or ancient enemy, grunted their good-bys, jerking their hands at us. The long, cold, immaculate fingers of the society man slithered into my hand, and he looked beyond me and bade me good luck. I think I had spoiled his day because I hadn’t fidgeted.

  My next appearance was on a woman’s daytime TV show, and Paul Durkee was to appear with me for a joint interview. It was one of those quiz shows. They had a wheel that spun around, and when it stopped a typewritten question on a subject of the wheel’s choosing popped out. The M.C. was one of those perpetually beaming men; he had a forced, happy face, but there were networks of red veins around his short, snub nose. There was a tremor in his hands and he had bleary eyes. He winced at Paul’s boisterous voice and wide gestures. His name was “Smiling” Somebody-or-other, and he kept smiling all the time when anybody could see he just wanted to put his head down somewhere and sleep it off.

  He was openly concerned about Durkee, for Paul was hamming it up, interrupting the pre-broadcast briefing with loud noises and lapses into the kind of language that would make anybody stop smiling.

  “Now,” he said, “we’ll talk about your experience for about five minutes. I think we’ll let Dorothy tell the story, and then, Paul,” he said with that easy familiarity of his profession, “you can add some comments. ...”

  “You bet I will,” Paul said. “I wanna tell you this kid really knocked ’em dead. Why she ...”

  The smile was painful but still in evidence. “Yes, fine. We’ll run through it in its entirety before air time. And then we’ll ask Dorothy the four big jackpot questions, and if she gets them all right, we’ll ask her the big jackpot super question.”

  I felt panic: all this buildup and then I’d probably goof on those questions. It was the way I felt, but some other man, some assistant to somebody, kept poking at me and winking. Paul hauled him off into some corner and was in fierce conversation with him.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo,” Paul said, just loudly enough to be heard by the M.C. “The whole show is fixed—they’re gonna give you the answers before we get on.”

  Mr. Smiling kept his face buried in his notes. Four different members of the program approached me, each whispering “test questions” at me, and we ran through the whole thing and then we were on TV.

  I sat in the hard plastic chair and told my story, and Paul reinforced it with frequent interruptions, waving his arms around and rolling his eyes, which searched frantically for the right camera. The M.C. kept interrupting Paul, his mind on the signals he was getting from some man behind the camera who kept rolling his hands for us to hurry up. There was a lot of applause and admiring groans from the audience of plump little out-of-town housewives with nothing better to do with their afternoon. Then Mr. Smiling, cutting Paul off with a blinding smile, got up and sang a little song to me in his thin, shaky, daytime TV voice. I stood there feeling like some kind of idiot. It is a very unnerving thing to have a man sing right at you in public; you don’t know what to do with your hands or where to look. I kept staring at his mouth. I could see the nicotine stains on his teeth, and I could hear Paul pounding time with his feet. Then the song was over and there was a tinny flourish of trumpets. I was marched over to the wheel and I spun it and proceeded to answer the four questions. Of course they were the “test questions,” and I responded with the answers I had been given. Mr. Smiling stamped his feet and had the audience whoop it up for me each time. I could feel my face burning and my smile frozen on my mouth. Paul roared out over everybody else, “Isn’t she terrific!” and his face was bunched up into a look of such sincerity that the camera focused on him. That only led him to further utterances; he was having a wonderful time, laughing right in their faces and they thought he was on the level.

  I missed the super-super jackpot question and so lost a trip to Spain and a dishwasher: no one had cued me on this one. For one terrible moment, both Mr. Smiling and I thought Paul was going to make a scene about that, but he just sat there, making faces and wiping his hands all over his eyes and the audience moaned in sympathy. Paul was having the time of his life. I ended up with a grand total of $250, which Paul and I were to split between us, and a box of hair lotion and powdered detergent and menthol cigarettes and some cold tablets.

  They practically had to drag Paul off the stage to make way for the next contestants, and the M.C. looked like he needed a shot to get him through the rest of the show. Some assistant producer said he’d mail the check to me in a few days, and that I should split with Paul. I gave Paul the cartons of menthol cigarettes, and he held them in his large hands as if they were contaminated. He looked around wildly for a wastebasket, then hurled the cartons of cigarettes from him as if they were burning his fingers.

  The assistant producer gasped in horror and retrieved the cartons, clutching them to him like children. He moved his head around quickly and spoke in a whisper: “Jesus Christ, the sponsor is around—you want to get us canned?”

  Paul started to make a speech about the sponsor, but I took his arm and led him to the door. He stopped on the stairway and said, in a calm, rational, perfectly sane voice, “Wasn’t that a nutty ball? My God, what screwballs in this world!”

  That night, I received a phone call from some woman with the artificial tones of hurriedly acquired culture. She told me how proud the people of New York were of me, and how delighted they would be to have me as a guest on their well-known, coast-to-coast evening musical quiz show at the end of the week. It was a very big money show. You had to run across the stage in your stocking feet and ring a bell before your opponent did and then identify the song the orchestra was playing. Then you had to answer questions on a medley of songs and keep coming back every week until you had amassed a fortune.

  “So, my dear, we’d like you to come down tomorrow morning for a briefing; we’ve cleared it, of course, with the police department.”

  �
�No,” I said quietly, “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “But you don’t understand, dear. I’ve spoken to Inspector Rodgers at Public Relations, and he gave me your phone number. So it’s all set.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to be on your show: I’m too tired. I have an ulcer and my doctor said to take it easy: no more strain; no more TV. No more any of this.”

  The voice was brittle but still bright and certain. “Our prize money, dear, is quite high, as I’m sure you know.”

  “I’m not interested. Besides, I don’t know anything at all about music—I’m completely tone deaf.”

  The laugh in my ear was wise and knowing and seemed relieved to have hit on the real problem. “You won’t have to worry about that, my dear. Good heavens, don’t worry about that at all. We’ll have a little ... briefing ... you know.” She spoke archly and, she thought, discreetly.

  I had just wanted to hear her say it, but I was really too tired to care any more. “No. I don’t want to run across your lousy stage in my stocking feet and ring your lousy bell and win your lousy money.”

  Now the voice was shocked, hurt and outraged. “Now just a minute. Do you realize that we have a waiting list of contestants from all over the country? Do you realize that it’s a privilege to appear on our show? Do you realize that hardly anyone can get on our show?”

  “Good,” I said. “Call someone up from your big endless list and give them my place.” And I hung up.

  There were other phone calls: crank calls from any nut with a dime and a phonebook, strange hollow voices rising with some peculiar excitement, starting out with a compliment on my work and ending in obscenities. And friends—well meaning but also touched with some curious excitement for detail. Finally, Tony said he would have the phone company change our number, and it would remain unlisted. We kept the phone off the hook after eight o’clock at night.