“Care to comment, Mrs. Spungen?”
“How does it make you feel, Mrs. Spungen?”
“Get what he deserved?”
“Happy?”
“Sad?”
“End of ordeal?”
The shutters clicked, the TV cameras rolled. Pens were anxiously poised. I said nothing. I felt nothing. Just my own pain.
“Don’t you want to comment, Mrs. Spungen?”
“How about the criminal justice system?”
“What do you think of it now?”
I closed the door in their faces.
“Wait–!”
“We need a statement—”
The reporter nearest the door began to ring the bell again. I leaned against the inside of the door, the ache in my chest making it hard to breathe. The pain had started right after I had learned of Nancy’s death. It would not go away. I’d seen a doctor but he said I was in perfect health. I thought about running from the press. I had my coat on and my keys in my hand. I always did now, so I’d be ready to run. But I knew I’d never get away from them. They’d follow me. They’d find me, wherever I went.
The repeated ringing brought my seventeen-year-old son, David, downstairs. He hadn’t yet left for school. Not that leaving was anything more than a token gesture. He rarely made it to school. Mostly, he sat in the public library. He had stopped seeing his friends. He had stopped living. We had all stopped living. I had quit my job; Frank went off to work like a zombie and came back that way; Suzy, who was two years older than David, had isolated herself in her apartment in the city. She seldom went to her classes at the Philadelphia College of Art and we saw little of her.
But the reporters didn’t care about any of us, just as they hadn’t cared about Nancy. All they wanted was another installment in their ongoing freak show, to sell papers, to boost ratings.
“What’s going on?” asked David.
“Sid OD’ed. He’s dead.”
David nodded grimly. He wasn’t surprised. He had no more capacity to be surprised. He had grown up with too much anger and pain and tragedy. He had grown up with Nancy.
“I’ll call the police,” he declared, and went off to use the phone. I just stood there in the hallway.
A patrol car came immediately. The Nancy Spungen–Sid Vicious case was the biggest story Huntingdon Valley, our little Philadelphia suburb, had ever known. Any call from the Spungen residence brought a quick response.
The officers moved the reporters off our property and sent them on their way. David and I watched from the living room window.
As soon as the policemen left, two English tabloid-newspaper men returned and began to ring the bell again. When I didn’t answer, they backed up onto the front lawn and began to yell.
“How dare you call the police!”
“We’re not bothering you, Mrs. Spungen!”
“We just want to talk!”
One of the reporters was particularly abrasive. Three days after Nancy’s funeral he’d shown up with a copy from a page of an English newspaper carrying the banner headline NANCY WAS A WITCH. He told me if I didn’t deny it people would assume it was true. I said “No comment” and closed the door. Somehow he managed to shove the page inside the door before it shut, then told the police I’d stolen it.
“We have a right!”
“How dare you call the police!”
David went out the door after the two reporters, fists clenched, face red. Six feet tall and powerfully built, he ran toward them. They turned and took off. He chased them across the lawn and down the block to their car. They jumped in, surprised and frightened, and sped away.
When David came back, I asked him to please go to school, to at least make the effort.
“You sure you’ll be okay here all by yourself?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Why are you wearing your coat?”
“I’m cold.”
He walked to his car and drove off. The phone rang. I thought about not answering it, but it might be Frank. Possibly he’d heard the news. I picked up the phone. It wasn’t Frank.
“Mrs. Spungen, it’s Anne Beverley,” said Sid’s mother, her voice strained.
We had spoken once before. She had phoned two days after Nancy’s murder to offer her condolences and to say she was certain Sid couldn’t have done it. It had been a bizarre call, but not as bizarre as when Sid himself had phoned me the following day.
“I’m … I’m sorry your son is dead,” I now managed to say. “I’m sorry for you.”
“Thank you. Our children were very special children. I suppose this is the way it was meant to be. You know, no one else understood them except you and I.”
“I know.”
“Mrs. Spungen, may I bury him next to Nancy?”
I covered the phone, gasping from the pain in my chest. And from horror. How could she ask me to let her bury her son—my baby’s accused murderer—next to her?
“May I, Mrs. Spungen? They meant so much to each other.”
“You … can’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s … it’s a family plot.”
“Then what will I do? Where will I bury him? Perhaps somewhere else in the same cemetery?”
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
I hung up. The doorbell rang again. More reporters. I let it ring.
I went through the kitchen to the garage and found a piece of heavy, rubber-encased wire with which to hang myself. I’d been thinking about it each and every day for several weeks. In fact, suicide was all I thought about. I kept putting it off. Every day I told myself to wait until tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow the pain would go away. Maybe tomorrow I’d want to live again, have a reason to live again.
But I couldn’t take the pain anymore. It was unbearable and there was no end to it. Death was the only way out. I had no other alternative. Today was the day. This was it.
I went back inside the house with the wire, tied a noose around my neck, and looked at myself in the dining room mirror.
Nothing had worked out the way I’d planned.
Once I had looked forward to life. Twenty years before it had been full of promise. I was twenty then, a nice, reasonably attractive middle-class Jewish girl from Philadelphia. I was a college student, a good student. I had plans and ambitions. I had a kind, young husband who loved me as much as I loved him. I had dreams. Twenty solid years of anguish was not one of them. What had I done to deserve this?
Once I had been happy. I had known how to laugh. I had known how to cry. I hadn’t cried in twenty years. There had never been any time to cry since the day Nancy was born. No time for the luxury of tears. I had made a promise to Nancy the first time I saw her there in the maternity ward nursery. I had promised her a life of quality and dignity. It took every bit of my strength and my love to keep that promise over the twenty years of my daughter’s frightening, misunderstood, tragic life. It took every minute of every day.
I didn’t cry when I finally had to admit to myself that she was not like other little girls.
I didn’t cry when I realized she was angry and in pain and that nobody, but nobody, could help her.
I didn’t cry when she tried repeatedly to end her pain herself, first with a razor blade, then with a needle.
I didn’t cry when I knew she could no longer live with us in our home without destroying her sister and brother. She had already come close to destroying our marriage.
I didn’t cry when I got the news that she was dead. I held Frank while he wept through the night, my own eyes dry.
I didn’t cry at her funeral. I couldn’t. By then, I’d forgotten how.
I had never let myself feel the pain. I blocked it. Now I felt it. Oh, how I felt it.
I kept having the same nightmare. Every night in my dreams, Nancy was a small child of five, running up to me waving her hands in front of her face and exclaiming “Look what I have, Mommy! Look what I have!” When she got up close to me, I saw tha
t what she had all over her little girl’s hands were track marks from shooting heroin, the track marks she showed me when she was seventeen to let me know she was a drug addict. “Help me, Mommy,” she had said in real life, and in my dream, too. “Help me, Mommy,” cried little Nancy.
I hadn’t been able to. She was dead. And I was alone, totally alone in the world. My life had no meaning. I had no desire to work, to love, to be productive, to see anyone I knew, to smile. I had no desire to be alive.
I shivered. I was cold, even with my coat on.
I really knew Nancy was going to die young. She had wanted to die since she’d been eleven years old. I had long since accepted it as inevitable. It was just a matter of how and when. I had her death all mapped out in my mind for two years before it actually happened. It was my recurring fantasy. We would get a phone call early one morning from the police saying that Nancy was in the hospital from a drug overdose. Frank, Suzy, David, and I would rush to the hospital. Nancy would be in a bed in a private room, conscious. It would be clean and quiet. She would say good-bye to each of us. We would say good-bye to her. Then she would die in my arms.
Nancy’s death was dignified in my fantasy. In death, she had at last found the peace she never found in life. The ordeal was over.
It did not work out that way. A murderer intervened. Nancy died under a hotel sink with a knife in her stomach, the whole world there to gape at her. She died the subject of ridicule and scorn. The press called her Nauseating Nancy. Their stories made it seem like she had “asked for it,” just like a rape victim in a provocative dress “asks for it.” They made it seem like she got what she deserved. In life, the media had made my daughter into a distasteful celebrity; in death, they made her a freak. There was a derisive skit about her on Saturday Night Live, jokes about her in Johnny Carson’s monologue. Some people were selling Sid and Nancy T-shirts. Others were buying them.
Nobody wanted to hear of her pain, her sadness, her sensitivity. Nobody wanted to understand Nancy. Nobody cared.
I wanted to run to the highest roof and scream “Nancy was my baby! She was my child!” I wanted to yell “No matter what she became, she didn’t deserve to die this way—to be treated this way!” I wanted to scream “You don’t understand her! She was loved!”
I wanted to yell so loud that everyone would have to hear, have to understand, have to care.
But I was mute. I could not fight anymore. I ached too much. I was feeling all of the pain, the twenty years of pain I’d accumulated and held in through our tortured life with Nancy. It wouldn’t go away. If only it would go away.…
And now, as I stood in front of the mirror, noose around my neck, I realized the pain wouldn’t go away because I wouldn’t let go of Nancy. I couldn’t. My odyssey with her wasn’t complete. Her murderer had taken more than her life. He’d taken my life, my purpose, my focus. He had taken away my right to keep my promise to her. I had promised Nancy a life of quality. Keeping that promise was the basis of my existence. Death is a part of life. Her death of quality was denied her. I had to find a way to give it to her—to keep my promise.
I could not hang myself. I could not give up. I had to fight, to survive. My promise had to be kept. Only then could I let go of Nancy. Only then could I get on with my own life.
At that moment I didn’t know how. All I knew was that my path to the future lay somewhere in the past, in our journey with Nancy. Too much had happened that I had never understood, had never let myself feel. I had to make some kind of sense of it. I had to figure out how we’d survived. I had to let the pain out.
I had a responsibility—to Nancy and to the others. There were other Nancys out there. Too many. It was too late for Nancy, but it wasn’t too late for them.
I had to warn the parents of these other Nancys. They were groping around in the dark just like we had, feeling all alone, feeling somehow to blame for their child’s anguish. They weren’t alone; they weren’t to blame. I had to let them know that. I had to try to spare them from the nightmare we went through. I had to warn them what might happen to their child, to their other children, to their marriage, to their dreams. I knew what happened to ours.
There was hope for somebody else’s child. There had to be. Only then would Nancy’s life and death have meaning. Only then would the pain go away, the nightmare end, and my life begin again.
Only then could I say good-bye.
Chapter 1
The doctor who delivered Nancy had worked his way through medical school as a prize fighter. He was very tall, muscular, and always in a tremendous hurry. I saw him once every month during my pregnancy, and before each visit I prepared a list of questions. (How will I know when I’m in labor? Will it hurt?) Each month the list got longer and longer, because I never asked him any of the questions. I was too intimidated by him. He seemed so busy.
I was twenty years old and I’d never had a baby before.
By my seventh month the list was quite long. On the day of my appointment I examined it nervously while I sat in my religious philosophy seminar—I was in my senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. My friend Janet passed me a little wadded-up piece of paper and giggled. The professor glared at me. Janet had come up with by far the best name to date: Nebuchadnezzar Spungen.
My obstetrician’s office was right in the midst of the Penn campus, which spreads across several blocks in West Philadelphia. As I waddled across the campus, I convinced myself that this would be the day I would have an office talk with him. I would not be intimidated.
I was quite a sight now in my maternity dress, knee socks, and saddle shoes, and I got some funny looks from the other students. You didn’t see many pregnant students on campus in 1958. At Penn, in fact, you saw only one—me.
When I got there, I had my blood and urine tested and sat down in the waiting room. A pregnant woman who was about my age came in with her mother and sat down across from me. We were due at about the same time and had chatted a bit during previous visits. Now I smiled at her, but she just stared vacantly ahead. Her mother took her hand, squeezed it, and turned to me.
“It died,” she said softly.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“She’s carrying a dead baby. He said she might have to carry it another month. Maybe longer.”
I swallowed, looked away. I was afraid if I looked at the girl too long maybe it would happen to me, too. I wondered if such a thing could happen to me, and if it did, how I would tell. How would I feel? I didn’t know. My baby was very active, seemed to move around constantly. That was all I knew.
The nurse finally led me into a tiny examining room. It was cold in there. I waited, watching the traffic down on Walnut Street, clutching my list, which was moist now.
The doctor had a deep, booming voice. I heard him out in the corridor, before he burst in. He seemed to fill the room.
“How are we feeling?” he barked.
“Okay,” I replied weakly.
He vigorously scrubbed his enormous, hairy hands, dried them, and put one of them over my bare abdomen. He began to prod and poke.
“Any complaints?”
“I … well, no. But I was … I mean, I do have—”
The phone rang. He reached over and picked it up while he continued to poke around. “How often?” he said into the phone. “Okay, get yourself over to the hospital. I’ll meet you there. Ten minutes. ’Bye.”
He hung up and was out the door in one stride. He stopped, turned back to me as an afterthought, and smiled. “The baby’s doing fine.”
Then he was gone.
I sat on the table so long the nurse came in to ask if something was wrong. I wanted to burst into tears, but I did not. I just sat there on the table with my list, feeling very alone.
Frank, my husband, had been stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in the army reserves since the first month of my pregnancy. Actually, he’d already left when I discovered I was pregnant. I kept hoping I wasn’t. One day, at a friend’s wedding, I thoug
ht my period actually had started, and I dashed, delighted, for the ladies’ room. I was wrong.
Frank and I knew we wanted kids, but we were thinking five years away, not immediately. He had just graduated from Penn and wouldn’t start working until he got out of the army, though he had already landed a good job with an accounting firm in New York City. Our plan had been that he would commute to New York every day from Philadelphia until I finished school. Then we would move there. I was majoring in foreign languages and wanted to go into foreign trade. I wanted a career. New York seemed like the very best place for us. We wanted to work our way up together. We wanted to travel to Europe. We wanted adventure.
Unplanned pregnancies were very common then. Just about everyone I knew had at least one unplanned child. Frank and I ended up having two. There were abortionists around, but you didn’t go to them—at least not if you were a nice Jewish girl, which I was. And Frank, well, Frank was a nice Jewish boy. Maybe he had been driving a truck when we’d met three years before, when I was still in high school. Maybe he had been running with a tough crowd and had a bit of a wild reputation himself. No longer. He had settled down, gone to college, and worked hard.
We never discussed an abortion. It simply wasn’t an option. In 1958 you just made a shift, changed your original plans, and looked forward to your new ones. In 1958 you had fewer options.
With Frank in the army I reluctantly moved out of our little apartment on campus. It had cockroaches and mice and only one electrical outlet, but it was our first home and I loved it.
I moved back into my old room at my mother’s row house about ten blocks from campus. Since Mother worked, I made dinner when I got home from school, then stretched out and watched The Mickey Mouse Club on TV. In retrospect, it was a very easy pregnancy. I was a little tired and had some backaches, but my health was fine.
It’s just that I was so confused, so lonely. None of my friends had had babies yet. I had no sisters, or brothers for that matter. I tried to be low-key about it with Mother, but during the fifth month I finally sought her out.
It was bedtime. I stood in the doorway of her bedroom and watched her as she sat at her dressing table, brushing out her hair.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 2