‘Mimi . . . I’m sorry. I’ve just been so set on overcoming this thing that I hadn’t thought about how you must feel.’ I shut my eyes (they were watering) and bit my lip. Which of course promptly bled.
‘Okay, you don’t have to flagellate yourself,’ she said unevenly. ‘You have enough on your plate right now. You’re doing great. Just don’t carry it too far. I want Cully to move in for me. And he wants to. Just for a while, okay? Charles wanted to move in instead’ – and her mouth turned up in a lopsided smile – ‘but I told him the town had given us enough attention as it was. Besides being good for us, I think the move would be good for Cully.’
‘What do you mean?’
We had migrated into the kitchen. Mimi began washing dishes. She paused in her task, her hands immersed in the soapy water. She sucked in her lips, a sure sign that she was thinking heavy thoughts. ‘Cully is a psychologist, but that doesn’t mean he’s immune to the syndromes he treats in other people,’ she said finally. ‘I think he’s probably very good professionally. He’s always in control, he always knows what he wants to say. And he can keep so calm and detached. Boy, is he good at detachment!’ Mimi screwed up her face expressively, and I laughed a little. I picked up a dish towel and began drying.
‘I bet lots of people think he’s a cold fish,’ she continued soberly. ‘But he’s not underneath. He’s as vulnerable as anyone else; and maybe more tender than average. Rachel’s leaving him hurt, just as bad as Richard’s leaving me. But I wailed and cried to you, and now it doesn’t ache quite so much.’ Mimi’s crooked smile lit her face. ‘Cully, now, hasn’t wailed and moaned at all. Mama thinks that means he’s glad to “get shuck” of Rachel. Well . . . he may have fallen out of love with her, but he had shared a life with her, and he had a lot of pride involved in that marriage.’
‘Being a psychologist wouldn’t help in that situation,’ I said as I put the glasses away in the cabinet. ‘You’d feel like everyone was saying, “Ha, ha, look at the pro who can’t even counsel his own marriage back into shape.” ’
‘Exactly.’ Mimi nodded vigorously, the dark cloud of hair flying. ‘So Cully really needs to feel all male and effective right now, and I do want him here. I think it’s a good thing for all of us. Really, won’t you sleep a little better with a man in the house?’
‘I think, frankly, that I’d sleep better with a shotgun in the house. But since I’m not about to buy one and have no idea how to fire one if I had it, Cully will have to do.’ I imagined briefly how Cully would react if he knew he was running second to a shotgun. Then I handed Mimi the last dirty cup and saucer and headed toward the living room to try to read my assignments. My body was reminding me at every step that it had been abused, and the damn movie was still playing. Studying wasn’t going to be easy, but I had to start sometime.
‘Hey,’ called Mimi as I reached the door. I turned.
‘I just want you to know, you’re a great woman. Now don’t come hug me or anything,’ she added hastily as I took a step forward. ‘Or I’ll cry again. But I just wanted to tell you that. You should already know I feel that way, but sometimes I want to tell people things I’m sure they know.’
‘I love you very much, Mimi,’ I said, and left the room. My eyes were watering again.
9
SO CULLY MOVED into the house, in a limited way, the next weekend. Since Celeste had left the dining room suite to a niece, the room opposite mine was already empty. Mimi and I had made an exploratory trip to the attic in search of furniture for Cully’s room and had discovered a bed set that apparently had been stored up there for years. We managed to haul the mattress halfway down the stairs, but I was too sore to get it any further. Fortunately, at that point Alicia breezed in. She willingly helped Mimi drag the mattress out into the backyard to air. Until her arrival, our labor had been a hasty chore of sweat and curses, and pain for me. With Alicia on the scene the old house rang with giggles and a stream of comments flavored with her heavy accent.
‘I hope you all have a beer in the icebox to pay me for that!’ she gasped, after the box springs had followed the mattress out into the yard.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘We have two six-packs left over from the party.’ I creaked into the kitchen and bent stiffly to peer into the refrigerator. The bruises on my torso and face were assuming a fainter but wider spectrum of colors now that most of them were almost healed. I had all the hues of a sick rainbow. The deepest cuts were still scabbed, a healthy but hideous development.
It was a temperate early November day. The sun, radiant in a clear sky, was a blessing, not the curse of full summer. The leaves were turning in a halfhearted southern way; a light breeze fluttered them from the oaks. There was peace in that day, and calm; I think we all felt it as we sat on the porch drinking our beers.
‘Is Cully going to see his private patients here, Mimi?’ asked Alicia idly.
‘No, he’ll go back to his apartment for that.’
‘Good. You don’t want those folks coming in and out here. I reckon it might be one of them that did this to Nickie.’ Alicia inclined her head toward my bruises.
Mimi’s eyes met mine in surprise. ‘Why do you think that, Alicia?’
‘Oh, it stands to reason,’ she said calmly. ‘Any you-know-what who can do a thing like that’ – and she crossed her expensively trousered legs tightly – ‘has got to be sick in the head.’ Alicia stared out over the serene backyard where Celeste had spent so many hours. The roses were still blooming, but reluctantly, tired of the task. Mao was industriously stalking an oblivious cardinal. ‘Not that that’s any excuse. You hear all the time about criminals with four and five convictions getting back out on the streets in no time. Remember Cotton Meers, out on work release two years after he shot his ex-wife’s boyfriend? And us – the people who pay the taxes that pay those judges – we’re the ones out here with ’em. We pay over and over. Not them, not the criminals. Oh no, they’re sick and they have to be cured. Pooh. Some people are just bad. Born bad. Not sick – evil. Cure them, hell. They should be removed. Like rabid dogs.’
I’d heard this view before, of course. Reactionary as it sounded, there was a lot of truth in it. I couldn’t deny that the man who’d raped me was genuinely sick; of course he was. Any man who could do what he’d done to a woman who couldn’t defend herself, a woman totally unwilling, was sick. Did I want him treated, rehabilitated, freed? Did I pray, if his problem was plain and pure evil, that he’d find the Lord? No-siree. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted him to suffer. If that couldn’t be arranged, I was willing to settle for just plain death. Nothing like an experience with face-to-face violence to provoke a gut reaction, I thought. And my gut reaction was definitely eye for eye, tooth for tooth. At the same time, and at risk of sounding pompous even to myself, I admitted that a big dose of this vigilantism would ruin my country.
‘You know,’ I began, after Mimi had fetched three more beers, ‘I wonder if the kind of man who’d do this would ever voluntarily go for help? I doubt, myself, that he’s among Cully’s patients. Maybe he can justify, in his own heart, what he did to me. He must be able to.’ I was thinking of this for the first time. ‘Otherwise, how can he live with himself?’
‘He probably didn’t even give it two thoughts,’ Alicia said with disgust. ‘Don’t you waste your time trying to understand an animal like that. Besides, I read two magazine articles that both said rapists have the lowest cure rate of any offenders under treatment. Animals.’
Animals don’t rape – only men rape; but I decided to let that point go by. I knew what she meant.
‘How do you feel about what happened to me, Alicia?’ I asked curiously. Alicia gave an impression of transparency, but I’d discovered just now that her true feelings were very different from what I’d expected. Civilized Alicia had let her savage vein show.
She stirred uneasily in her chair. I realized I’d asked a northern question; or not so much northern as unsouthern. Her lips were disapproving. But the beer, or th
e sweetness of the cool day, or us being women together, made her answer honestly. ‘I’m scared to death,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m scared to death. You know I’m by myself most of the time, with Ray on the road so much. Why did it have to happen to you, so close to my house? If it had been a nigger woman in the subdivision’ – I noticed Mimi wince – ‘well . . . that kind of thing happens all the time down there. It was bad enough with that little girl this summer, worse when it was Barbara Tucker. But then it had to happen two doors down from me – to someone I’ve known for years.’
After all this directness, Alicia covered her face with her hands, to let her features re-form behind them. She sighed, uncovered, and looked directly at me for the first time that afternoon. ‘Sometimes I think I’m just mad at you since it did happen to you – not to someone I can forget about,’ she said. We stared into each other’s faces for a long moment. Her blue eyes dropped; she sighed. ‘There, I’ve gone and said it and probably hurt your feelings, and that’s not Christian. You shouldn’t have gotten me in a corner, Nickie. I’m real fond of you, but you shouldn’t have gotten me in a corner. You just forget what I said. You have other fish to fry than worrying about what I think. I’ll just go on with all my committees,’ she said, making a wonderful wry face, ‘and run this town till I have a baby.’
She reassumed her brightness like a favorite sweater. ‘Got to run, now,’ she said cheerfully. She rose, gathered up her beer cans to deposit in the kitchen on her way through the house, dropped a sudden kiss on the top of my head, and breezed away.
‘I did wrong,’ I told Mimi.
‘You didn’t do wrong. Your crisis just spread. The old “stone in the pond” image. They always do, crises. It’s not just yours. It’s everyone’s.’
‘That makes me feel guilty.’
‘Then you are a true southerner, despite your Yankee ways,’ Mimi told me solemnly.
We both laughed, startling Mao’s intended victim, who gave a wild squawk and flew away. I realized it was the first time I’d laughed in a week. Mao looked at us reproachfully; Mimi promised him an extra dollop of 9-Lives at supper. Then Cully’s car pulled in beside Mimi’s on the gravel apron, and he emerged with an armload of clothes. The afternoon melted away in toting, lifting, and arranging.
After supper (I made chicken-fried steak, one of Cully’s favorites, in his honor) we pulled on sweaters and returned to the porch to watch the dusk. Darkness was closing in faster and faster as the year drew to a close. After we had settled in the lawn chairs, due to be stored for the winter, none of us spoke. We were three people who had known each other for a long time and were enjoying each other’s silent companionship, the evening, our place in the world. For the first time, I thought that true peace might come to me again, that the even glow of my life before the rape might resume.
* * * *
In the next two weeks Cully began adjusting to us, and we to his male presence. (That meant, chiefly, that we remembered to be dressed when we left our rooms.) Since he wasn’t due in his office at the college until nine, he went out to jog at seven-thirty every morning. I had the bathroom all to myself to get ready for my eight o’clock class.
Houghton’s committees were recovering from their beginning-of-the-term exhaustion and churning with projects. Mimi was spending hours on the telephone at work and at home, reminding people to attend this or accomplish that. If I listened, I could hear her every evening while I studied in the living room. I’d never understood exactly what Mimi did, but her job title was College Coordinator. As she explained it, she had to know what every club and committee on campus planned in the way of activities and projects, allot them a date and room for meetings and whatever similar help they needed, and handle the needs of the campus. For example, if the Chi Omegas or the Chess Club wanted to ‘beautify’ the campus one Saturday, Mimi might suggest that an ornamental bridge in the gardens needed painting. If the Recruitment Drive Committee wanted to meet in the Executive Conference Room on the same night the Campus Entertainment Committee wanted to use it, Mimi settled that, somehow, with a characteristic combination of tact, common sense, and steamrolling.
Apparently there was a lot more involved, but these were Mimi’s main functions. She also served on several committees herself, simply because she was a Houghton and therefore had a strong interest in the college.
I heard a lot about Mimi’s job in the weeks following the rape. My fund of small talk seemed to have dwindled away. Mimi filled in the gap while I waited for a new crop to grow. Cully chipped in with anecdotes about the iniquities of his predecessor, who’d given students some rather strange advice, to hear the stories Cully told. Now that I could observe Cully from a more detached point of view, I discovered he had a deep-buried sense of humor and a lot of patience.
Although all of us may have been thinking of what had happened to me, and who might have done it, my two housemates never discussed it unless I brought it up. Cully and Mimi listened whenever the terror and anger got to be too much for me. I tried not to drag on them, to leech them; I only went to them for help when I couldn’t stand my own company anymore.
A week after Cully moved in, I walked in my sleep. He found me looking up the staircase from the foot of the stairs, trying to raise my leg to mount them. I only half-woke when he told me gently to go to bed. I obeyed in a stupor; I only recalled the incident the next day when he cautiously asked me how I was feeling. I don’t think I ever walked in my sleep again. But sometimes when I went to bed very tired or anxious, I would wake about three o’clock with my heart pounding, sweating in the chilly night. Most of those nights I could go back to sleep. If the fear or the rage didn’t keep me awake.
The detectives dropped in again after a week, to ask me if I’d remembered anything else. I had nothing to tell Mr Tendall and Mr Markowitz. They didn’t seem to expect much.
Charles’s lawyer friend didn’t ask me out again. I was not surprised, and not much hurt. Charles himself was very awkward around me when he came to pick up Mimi or to eat supper with us. He treated me like Mad Aunt Letitia taking an outing from her attic; he humored me. But at least, as I kept reminding myself, he was trying to be kind.
I tried, too, even though it nearly cost me my expensive new dental work. I ground my teeth together frequently. The depth of my irritation did surprise me a little. I’d been halfway to liking Charles Seward before I’d been raped. (Everything was divided into two phases for me – before the rape and after.) Now Charles’s mere presence filled me with uneasiness. Don Houghton’s, too. I couldn’t understand it. Don was sweet; he suffered through acute embarrassment to tell me how sorry he was I’d been ‘hurt.’
Other men didn’t affect me that way, so why Charles and Don? What did they have in common? At odd moments I wondered, but I could never figure it out. I dismissed it as a fluke.
Barbara and I met in her office on a Thursday afternoon, which was a free afternoon for both of us. I’d been compiling my list in odd moments. Sometimes in the middle of a class a name would hop into my mind, and I’d surreptitiously whip out my pieces of paper and write it down. The list was dismayingly long, despite the brevity of my life in Knolls. I’d met so many men the times I’d stayed with Mimi years before. There were so many male students in my classes.
Barbara’s list was even more staggering. She knew almost all the male faculty members and at least a couple hundred students. She knew fewer townspeople, but she’d met some, of course, in her years at Houghton.
I guess the same thought crossed both our minds as we stared blankly at the little pile of paper: Our project was impossible. Swiftly I tried to imagine factors that might make our failure less sickeningly disappointing. The depth of our outrage would fade with time. It had to; human beings who wanted to remain mentally healthy could not carry such a crushing load. The rapist might get caught tomorrow, go to trial, get a heavy sentence . . .
But Barbara, who had managed words on paper for years, had other ideas. ‘Our old friend pro
cess of elimination,’ she said, her crisp midwestern vowels snapping clearly. ‘Okay!’ She pushed the brown frame of her glasses back up her snubby nose. ‘How old was the voice?’ she asked me.
It was like a pop quiz. ‘I would say – thirty or over,’ I answered slowly. ‘Past youth, way past youth.’
‘Same here. There, we’ve eliminated the students, except for the overage ones.’
I began to feel more optimistic. ‘I only know two students my age or older,’ I said. ‘Two vets. Dan Kirby and Paul Scotti.’
Barbara closed her eyes. ‘Don’t know Paul Scotti,’ she said finally. ‘Dan Kirby’s in my Victorian Prose class.’
‘Then we have one name.’
‘And we’ve eliminated about two hundred fifty men.’
‘In one fell swoop.’
We’d both had the foresight to list students separately. Barbara threw away two sheets of her list and one of mine. ‘What else do we know that could eliminate some more names?’
I pinched my cheek to help me think. ‘White. Since we talked about that before, I presume you didn’t list any blacks.’ Barbara nodded. ‘Heavy . . . and not extremely tall or short. That should knock out a few people.’
‘The short part, anyway. I thought he was average or maybe a little taller.’
‘And you were standing up, so you’d know better than I would. Strike the shorties and the very skinny men.’
Excluding the students except for Dan Kirby, my list consisted of twenty-six names. Barbara said hers reached fifty-one. This purge of too-short, too-thin men pared my list to twenty, Barbara’s to forty-two.
‘Compare, now they’re manageable,’ I suggested, and handed over my list. I watched Barbara’s pen move down the columns. It hesitated over some names, drew a decisive line through others.
‘Cully Houghton’s not on your list,’ she said at one point. ‘He’s on mine.’
A Secret Rage Page 10