Policewoman

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  “When was your last period?”

  “Beginning of January.”

  “You are in good health?” She turned to study me and her face was the face of every rotten, unfeeling teacher who had ever gotten into the profession by mistake—a face that could look at a weeping schoolgirl and say, “Your tears don’t move me, young lady, they don’t impress me,” because she had never had any tears of her own. Her eyes were small pebbles of meanness, blunted with uneven lashes and framed by unplucked brows set too low. It was a cruelly disinterested face, and she looked at me without seeing me. We went through a series of questions: height, 5’ 5”; weight, 115 pounds; no heart trouble; no high or low blood pressure; not given to fainting spells.

  “And you do not carry on, right?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. “You do not make a fuss about things, eh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You ever have cramps with your periods?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Good,” she said, “then you will know what it will feel like. You will have some cramps, a few bad ones maybe. I will give you something so it will not be so bad, but I will tell you this now, and you will remember it.”

  There was a coldness in her voice as she leaned forward, pointing the ballpoint pen at me. There was a menacing set to her mouth and her small eyes. “There will be no sound in that room, no sound.” She pointed to the back room as though it were an execution chamber. “The doctors are good men and know what they are doing, but they will stand for no nonsense. They must have silence, and if you cry out or make a noise,” she held the pen straight in the air, “one single noise, they will be very angry and it will not go well for you. You understand this?”

  I nodded. The sweat was pouring down the sides of my body, clammy and cold. “Yes.”

  “Then you will give me the money.”

  I dug into my pocketbook, which contained no gun or shield or identification in my own name, and took the five one-hundred-dollar bills from my wallet. They were treated with a chemical that would coat the hands with an invisible phosphorescent substance which would show up under a special lamp, and the serial numbers had been recorded. As soon as I handed her the money, a man burst from the other room and came to her side, watching her count the five bills. She turned to him with a look of pure hatred.

  “Five,” she said angrily. “What did you think—I cheat you?” She shoved the money to him, and he left the room with a whisper of words. He hadn’t even glanced at me.

  “Now,” Mrs. Poland said, “one other thing. Afterward, you will stay here for one hour. You will drink the coffee I give you and ...”

  For some incomprehensible reason, I said, “I can’t drink coffee—it makes me sick. Could I have tea?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Coffee is a great stimulant—you will drink it as a medicine, and then you will leave here. You will walk out of here alone and without any sound, and you will walk slowly to the corner. There are many taxicabs on the corner and you will go wherever you wish. And now,” she lowered her voice and leaned forward, her face close to mine, “you will never come back here or look for us again. We will not be here. And you will tell no one or you will be in terrible trouble. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait here.” She left the room again and returned immediately with a hypodermic needle in her hand, holding it up to the light. Some shiny yellowish fluid ran down, then up the length of it as she approached me.

  “Roll up your sleeve,” she said, taking my right arm. I froze from my neck down, unable to move, not wanting whatever was in the needle, but she grabbed my arm and pushed the sleeve of my sweater up and injected the stuff into my veins.

  “What was it?” I asked. “What was the injection?” (Oh, Charlie, hear it. They injected me with something.)

  “It will relax you. You ask too many questions. Come.”

  The back room was brightly lit, and the two men had put on short white coats and were busy at a long table. In the center of the room was a kind of table with a thin, hard mattress.

  Mrs. Poland handed me a white dressing gown. “Take off your clothes and put this on with the opening in the back and lie on the table.”

  I saw a dirty pail, a wash pail on the floor next to the table, and my foot kicked it, or the pail seemed to kick my foot. The drug was taking hold, enveloping me in a kind of sleepy nausea. “What is the pail for?” I asked, the words thick and slow.

  Mrs. Poland said, “What do you think the pail is for? Come now, get undressed.”

  I stood leaning against the table staring at the pail, and I was aware that I was crying, because I could feel the sobs and feel the tears. But I didn’t remember starting to cry, and I could hear Mrs. Poland talking to the two men, the doctors, busy with their preparations. The pail is for the baby, I said, the pail is for my baby, for I was going to have this abortion and no one was going to help me, no one was going to stop it, it was going to happen. She said my child had no eyes; she said my child was blind.

  One of them, one of those “doctors” stood in front of me and looked down at my eyes, not speaking to me, not saying one word to me, just looking at my eyes. I could see his face enlarged in terrible detail: black, thick brows meeting over the bridge of his nose and bearing down on his black eyes. His nose and cheeks were covered with small black pits, and his face was blurred and smeared. I pressed my hands against my stomach and leaned against the table crying and crying, not seeing Charlie or the others who were suddenly in the room. I heard, or rather sensed, the confusion, the rushing about, the moving of bodies, the doctors against the wall, Mrs. Poland cursing and shrieking, spitting bitter words at me and at the other two men, blaming them, blaming me. I leaned against Charlie’s shoulder sickly, and he was smiling and saying something to me. All I could think of was that my child could not be blind and could not end up in that filthy pail on the floor.

  No one had known that I was pregnant. It was really not possible to know for sure, except that I knew. I told Tony that night, when it was over. Even though I was only ten days late, I knew that I was pregnant; I had known, I told him, at the moment of conception, had known all the time while Madame Zoruba had looked at my hand and muttered and told me that my child would be blind; I knew I had a child growing, forming, and she had said those terrible things. I drank tea and told him the full horror of it now. I had truly been some girl alone with those people and that pail on the floor.

  One of the two men was an illegal immigrant who had entered the country via Mexico. He had come from Europe to Canada to Cuba to the Pan American countries, to Mexico, to the United States, to New York, to West 87th Street, to apartment 16-A. The other was a doctor who had lost his license years earlier for abortion and suspected illegal dispensation of narcotics. Mrs. Poland had been a practical nurse, had run a rooming house, had sold shoes in a store that specialized in custom-built footgear for peculiar foot problems. The men and Mrs. Poland were indicted for attempted abortion, found guilty and sentenced to a year each. The illegal immigrant had his sentence suspended and was turned over to the United States Department of Immigration.

  Madame Zoruba went free: we had no case against her strong enough to stand up. Madame Zoruba is probably telling her fortunes still, making her dread predictions and whispering an address, a time and location to frantic girls and abandoned women.

  I took a leave of absence from the Police Department in July, and our daughter was born in November. When she was put into my arms, her eyes were large and blue and the crinkles under them indicated that they would be even larger and wider—to encompass the world around her, to see and to look and to find and to question. Holding her, Tracy, with Tony’s face in delicate miniature, I felt a terrible pity and sorrow for all women, for all girls who have entered apartment 16-A and all the rooms like it, alone, to leave their futures and their dreams and their hopes in some dirty pail on the floor.

  11

  “The jagged eye of justice
”

  WHEN MY DAUGHTER WAS nearly six months old, I returned to the Department and spent two weeks at the Women’s Bureau before being assigned to the Pickpocket Squad. It was spring, and it was a relief to get out of the office and into the sweet air of the park again. My partner was an amiable, slow-moving man who took his time and seemed to realize I was having some slight difficulties in getting back into it. I missed moves, my reflexes had slowed. What had once been natural had to be learned over again now: the quick encompassing glance at a crowd, the sharp, easily defined points of concentration.

  “Relax,” my partner said, “it’s just like swimming. You can stay away from it for twenty years, but let somebody throw you in the river and you’ll tread around a while, getting the feel of it, and next thing you know, you’ll be swimming just as good as ever.”

  On our fourth tour, we connected. We spotted him simultaneously: the one “wrong” element in a crowd. He was invisible or nonexistent to the other people visiting the zoo, but marked for us by that almost indefinable “something about him.” He was a young Puerto Rican pickpocket and we nabbed him on a grand larceny charge. Since he was unable to put up bail, his trial came up within the week. It was the first time I had ever taken part in a jury trial, and it was the first time I ever saw Judge Melvin Goldhaber. I had heard of him, of course.

  Judge Melvin Goldhaber was a majestic-looking man in his early fifties with a smooth pink face and thick sparkling white hair worn long, tapering regally behind his ears. It was rumored that he trimmed it himself. Vanity shone from his light blue eyes and was evident in the tilt of his chin, set just a trifle too high, so that the spectators had full benefit of his nearly perfect profile. He had long, slender fingers, like a musician, and whether he used them to tap a pencil, pound a desk or stab the air to reinforce a point, his gestures were calculated and spellbinding. The illusion of physical beauty was shattered, however, the moment he spoke, for the growling rough voice testified to a Lower East Side boyhood; none of the refining elements of higher education had tempered this ugly sound. Hearing the voice (and closing your eyes), you pictured the speaker as short and dumpy and muscular with black stubble on chin and cheek. The shock was reinforced because the graceful gestures of the hands were at odds with the delivery of the words. He had a strangely “unfinished” quality, yet he seemed to relish his impact on those around him.

  Judge Goldhaber had served what must have seemed to him endless years as a magistrate in the lower courts. Perhaps to break the boredom he had started to liven up the week-end night sessions. He had sensed an alert and appreciative reaction from the young college students out on a cheap date, and he began to make low jokes at and around the various derelicts brought before him. Eventually, he was considered “the thing to do” on a dull Friday or Saturday night. Playing more and more to his audience, Magistrate Goldhaber administered his version of justice on the basis of what seemed good for the “house.” He began inserting amusingly bitter little speeches and asides (holding his hand up to the court stenographer whenever necessary), and everyone seemed to appreciate his efforts—everyone, that is, except the culprit, who usually was some befuddled drunk, not too sure what his particular role in all this proceeding was supposed to be. There was scarcely a policeman in New York City who couldn’t regale a group of his fellow officers with a good “Goldie” story.

  When, through the machinations of the political machine, his various efforts, good press and patience were rewarded with a judgeship in General Sessions, “Goldie” found himself enthroned in a vaster theater. The fact that the attorneys trying the various cases saw no humor in his not-too-subtle direction of a case had no other effect on him than that his elegant hand would wave away all protests, valid or otherwise. During his five years as a judge he was cited some seven or eight times by various lawyers to various committees for various forms of unbecoming conduct, but this bothered him not at all. He had taken measure of these lawyers. He knew them well, and considered them not much better than the garbage they represented. He knew which ones were the trouble-makers, which ones were constantly trying to nail him down (no one had succeeded: just let them try!).

  Judge Goldhaber had a real sense of the times, a feeling for the people. He characterized the riffraff appearing before him as “rat-punks.” In his court it was his show, and his responsibility was to the people of what he liked to call “our fair city.” He knew he was right, for he had a collection of clippings—editorials from the largest daily newspaper in New York City citing him for his efforts toward stiffer sentences and quicker justice. He appeared on various radio shows with calm placidity and self-assurance, unbothered by his own gutter tones in denouncing the lice and vermin that were ruining our fair city—sounding for all the world like some escaped convict, yet leaning heavily on his physical appearance.

  Judge Goldhaber had the righteous citizen’s outrage toward the punk-hoodlums who put the “people of this city” to the expense of a trial, when obviously they were all guilty. His sworn enemy—as the people’s representative and as the tool of justice—was any bastard who stood before him accused of a first-degree crime who refused to accept a lesser plea, refused his good offer to “cop out.” Goldie would lower his sculptured chin and draw his silvered brows together and flick his elegant finger at the protesting thug. Then you’ll stand trial, he’d growl, and in my court, and you will get the maximum: this was his always fulfilled promise. It was a wise attorney who talked a client into “copping out” in Goldie’s court.

  But Minnie Drexel was not a wise attorney in the eyes of her colleagues, and she was a fool in the eyes of Judge Goldhaber. Her non-paying, Legal Aid clients, with only time to lose, hoping always for the miracle—which was nowhere evident in Judge Goldhaber’s domain—occasionally stuck with their not-guilty pleas.

  We all knew Mrs. Drexel: poor old Minnie. Whether people were discussing how she won a case, made a point, blasted the cop or cried openly in court over the defendant, or whether they were admiring her grudgingly for her relentless loyalty to her clients or ridiculing her emotionalism in losing a case, they always called her “poor old Minnie.” Not that she was so old; it seemed to me more that she was ageless, with a driving kind of energy and a quickness and sharpness not expected from the somewhat dumpy, matronly figure. Her voice had a carrying quality but was devoid of the fullness and resonance of her male colleagues in the Legal Aid battery. Her sound carried the way a scolding mother’s voice carries: nagging, repeating the same phrases incessantly until she was satisfied with the response or until an exasperated district attorney objected to a glassy-eyed judge that the witness had answered the question. Then poor old Minnie would spin around, glaring at the district attorney, and call out: “But not to my satisfaction! Not to my satisfaction!”

  Every police officer was suspect in her eyes; we were filled with treachery which she must unravel bit by bit. Layer by layer, she would try to explore the hidden motivations inherent in the act of accusing an itinerant laborer of theft, an illiterate girl of prostitution, a nineteen-year-old immigrant of rape. Her method of defense was furious accusation; every police officer knew it and was wary of Minnie. Poor old Minnie and her bevy of losers.

  I had never faced Mrs. Drexel on a witness stand, but I had often seen this small, shrill dynamo in action, had seen the beet-faced policeman fall helplessly into her traps while the other officers in court moaned inwardly as one of their brothers went sprawling feet-first or headlong into unguarded statements or remarks which poor old Minnie pounced on with triumph and cutting scorn.

  In my direct testimony I described the details of the arrest: my partner and I had observed the defendant removing a wallet from the back pocket of an unsuspecting father of two little boys who were watching the seals at the Central Park Zoo. I answered the brisk questions of the district attorney, who nodded, waving a hand at Mrs. Drexel. I leaned back slightly in the witness chair, taking a long deep breath, letting my eyes scan the room. There was a high w
hite slash of dusty sunlight streaking across the center of the courtroom, and the indistinguishable figures sitting along the polished oak rows were like lifeless statues spotlighted in a department store window. Several attorneys were seated in the front row, just back of the rail that enclosed the various tables and chairs and benches reserved for the attorneys trying cases, the defendant, witnesses, police officers and complainants. The jury was a blur of faces to my left. The district attorney, a man with thick sandy hair and the build of a slightly undersized football player, tilted back in his chair, speaking with some expensively dressed woman who leaned over the railing with the elegance of a bored young society matron.

  “You’re Detective Uhnak? Hmm, yes. Miss or Mrs. Uhnak?”

  “Mrs.,” I answered.

  Mrs. Drexel seemed distracted by a clutch of papers in her hands and did not raise her face. “Yes then, Mrs. Uhnak. And how long have you been a police officer?”

  “Nearly three years.”

  “And how long have you been a detective?” She still kept her face down.

  “About a year.”

  “And you’re a good police officer?” Mrs. Drexel asked, raising her face to mine.

  “Yes. I think so. I try to be.”

  Mrs. Drexel’s voice was impatient, and she fluttered the papers in front of her. “Oh yes, you’re a good police officer—I’ve seen you in court, day after day, testifying. Down in Special Sessions. I’ve seen you.”

  The remark was an accusation: I’ve seen you. I stiffened, watching the woman’s face—a flexible, mobile face, twitching with words. Mrs. Drexel had started her cross-examination at the angry pitch usually built up slowly by the male attorneys after the smooth, syrupy politeness of identification. But Mrs. Drexel had no time for slow-building irritations, and she began with an anger that often led her directly into a full-blown fury.

  “Now, let me see. You observed this boy,” turning to the defendant, fluttering her papers in his direction, “first at three o’clock last June 7 by the seal pond in the Central Park Zoo?”