Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Richard’s brothers were quite frank when they talked to the two priests in the parlor of the rectory. They gave a brief sketch of Richard/Rita’s life up to that moment. “Father, we are not Catholics. We don’t believe in the Catholic Church, or in any church, for that matter. But we will do anything, anything at all, go to any length, in order to help our brother.” The old priest excused himself and Gerald for a moment. They went outside.

  The pastor had several questions for Gerald. Did he think Richard O. was a case of possession? Gerald did not know; he had never come across such a case. Shouldn’t they alert the bishop? Gerald had already chatted with “young Billy” (the bishop’s nickname among his priests). There was no official diocesan exorcist. The bishop knew nothing about it, and he wanted to know less. “Let’s take it step by step from the top downward,” counseled Gerald cheerfully.

  They returned to the parlor and asked the two brothers for Richard O.’s medical and psychological reports. They could have them immediately, Gerald was assured. Gerald asked if Richard knew of the brothers’ visit to see the pastor and himself. Bert said he did not think so.

  “He may,” Gerald rejoined. And then he went on to explain that, if Richard were really possessed by an evil spirit, he could easily know much more than his brothers told him.

  This conversation took place three days after Christmas. The reports arrived early in the New Year. With the permission of his own pastor, Gerald went to live temporarily in the rectory of his old friend in order to be near Richard O. At the beginning of February, having digested the reports and spoken to the doctors and psychologists, he accompanied Richard’s two brothers on a first visit to Richard.

  Richard/Rita received them quite pleasantly in his house. That day he seemed inordinately happy. He spoke to them about himself and made no bones about his condition. He said that sometimes, as at that moment, he saw things clearly and knew he needed some kind of help. At other times, from what people told him, he went all funny. It was a constant change in him. And it was too painful and abrupt and unpredictable for him to carry on like that much longer. “Help me if you can,” he added. “Even if later I tell you to go to Hell, help me. I’ll sign any documents necessary.”

  Willingly, Richard/Rita said in answer to Gerald’s proposal, he would go to Chicago and undergo tests by doctors and psychologists of Gerald’s choosing. The following day they went to Chicago together. By some happy circumstance the visit there and the tests conducted by the psychologists and doctors went off without incident. Richard/Rita had no lapse into his sudden fits.

  While they were in Chicago, Gerald and the old priest went to see the only exorcist they could track down within reaching distance. He was a Dominican friar, an ex-missionary, who lived in retirement in a Chicago suburb. He smiled grimly as they told him their story.

  “Better you than me, boys,” he said quietly. “Let me put you through the rite of Exorcism and give you a few tips of my own for yourself and the assistants. I learned a thing or two in Korea. It wasn’t all wasted.”

  The old man inculcated the first principles of Exorcism. He warned Gerald not to try to take the place of Jesus. It was only by the name and power of Jesus, he emphasized, that any evil spirit could be exorcised. He schooled him in the various traps that awaited the unwary: the dangers of any logical argument with the possessing spirit; the need of strong, silent assistants; and the customary procedure of an exorcism.

  Gerald had to return several times to Chicago with Richard/Rita after the first occasion. He went by himself to see some theologians in order to get a more accurate knowledge of what went on during an exorcism. Richard/Rita himself had to make several trips in connection with his office work. All in all, it was the beginning of March before everything was in readiness. Gerald felt that he had taken all possible precautions. Intrigued as all the medical and psychiatric examiners were with Richard/Rita’s history and transsexual operation, they had satisfied themselves that Richard/Rita was medically and psychologically as normal as any other person, and that he was not indulging in any strange fun and games in order to attract attention. This had been suggested by one of the psychologists. The rite of Exorcism, Gerald decided, would do no harm.

  For the actual exorcism, he had chosen five assistants. Richard/Rita’s two brothers, Bert and Jasper, had volunteered for the job. The old pastor had secured the services of the local police captain and of an English teacher from the parish school. Richard’s landlord, Michael S., a Greek-American, a good friend of the old pastor, had been told of the exorcism and spontaneously offered himself. Gerald chose as his own priest assistant a young man recently posted to his parish, a Father John.

  Only once or twice in the last month before the exorcism was Gerald’s courage shaken. At one moment, the old Dominican friar took him aside as he and the pastor were leaving him after one of their visits. He asked Gerald if he was a virgin. He was, replied Gerald, but what difference could that make? The Dominican answered him rather offhandedly, trying to play down the import of his question. It made no difference, he said. It was just that Gerald would have more to suffer. At least, that is what he thought.

  Questioned closely by Gerald as to why he thought so, the Dominican looked at him for a moment; then he said in a still voice: “You haven’t paid your dues. You don’t really know what’s in you. But”—he wandered over to the door and opened it—“They do. Now”—motioning to where the old pastor was waiting for Gerald—“your friend is waiting. Go in peace. And don’t be afraid. This is your lot.” As Gerald and his old friend drove back home, they chatted about the whole matter. It was clear to him, the pastor said, that when one spent years in a certain type of job—the pastor in his parish, the old friar in his missionary work—you got a special sense. You can’t share it with anyone. You don’t want to, really. And what it tells you isn’t always pleasant. Sometimes you see dark, abiding presences where others see nothing but light. “It’s all very funny,” the pastor remarked to Gerald, who had fallen silent and thoughtful. “Don’t try to understand. You can’t get old before your time. It would tear the heart out of you.”

  The nearer the mid-March date of the exorcism came, the more unreal it all seemed to the participants, especially to Gerald. This was chiefly because of Richard/Rita. There was in those last days no sign of deterioration in him, no fits. All was calm and normal. He even received them all in his house the night before the appointed day and served them a dinner he had cooked himself. Afterward, he helped them arrange the room where the exorcism would be done and chatted amicably with them before they left. Gerald had brought the paraphernalia of Exorcism with him—crucifix, stole, surplice, ritual book, holy-water flask. On the suggestion of the old Dominican, a stretcher had been borrowed from a local clinic; they might need it for Richard/Rita.

  All were to assemble at 8:00 A.M. the following morning. For Gerald there were some swift seconds with an awry note. He was the last down the pathway out to the road where he had parked his car. As he turned back to close the latch on the gate, he saw Richard/Rita silhouetted in the main doorway of his little house. Gerald could not at that distance read the look in Richard/Rita’s eyes, but Richard/Rita’s hands caught his attention.

  When the pastor and Gerald had left him at the door, Gerald remembered clearly, Richard/Rita’s right hand, with open palm toward them, had been raised slightly in a goodbye gesture. The left had been resting on the doorknob. But now, as he looked back at Richard/Rita, the right hand was splayed out like a claw pointing toward him. The left, palm turned up, fingers slightly curled, was held stiffly. Gerald felt a shudder in his spine.

  “Come on, Gerald! Someone walking on your grave, I suppose?” It was the old pastor pulling his leg good-humoredly. Richard/Rita waved to them again and went inside.

  RICHARD/RITA

  The story of Richard O. is only in part, but nonetheless importantly, the story of a transsexual. He was born physically a male, but with an ineradicable desire to be a woman.
In his childhood his ideas and wishes were nebulous. In adulthood he firmly believed that each one of us can be male or female, masculine or feminine; that each one has an almost equal dosage of maleness and femaleness, of masculinity and femininity, before culture and civilization and social environment, as the persuasion goes, make little boys little boys and little girls little girls. He finally underwent the transsexualization operation—successfully, in medical terms. He then took the name Rita.

  Richard had a very clear and very early understanding of the difference between femininity and masculinity, and he was attracted by the seeming mystery of the feminine and repelled by the inadequacy of being restricted only to the masculine. From the age of sixteen on, Richard’s aim was to let the feminine in him emerge, so that he could supplement his masculine inadequacy with the self-sufficient mystery of femininity.

  From sixteen to twenty-five he actively sought, in full confidence and trust, to think, feel, and act “androgynously”; he was persuaded that he could have the union of feminine and masculine in himself. But the result was a great aloneness (not, at that stage, loneliness) with none of that desired union. At twenty-five he sought in marriage the same union. It did not work; he found neither the unity nor the union of love; and the androgynous persuasion in him withered.

  From his divorce at age twenty-nine, through his transsexualizing operation at age thirty-one, up to his exorcism at age thirty-three, he developed into a “watcher on the sidelines,” jealous of the supremacy of the feminine, fascinated by the essential function of the masculine. The mystery of femininity became something to unshroud; in Richard’s case his unshrouding of it amounted to blasphemy and a type of physicomoral degradation which haunts him today. The vitality of the masculine became a weapon for him; he saw it as a means of death.

  By the end of the summer 1971, he had voluntarily become possessed by an evil spirit which responded to the name of “Girl-Fixer.” This possession had started many years previously. His violent revolt against possession ended finally in his undergoing the Exorcism rite performed by Father Gerald. But, until after his exorcism, Richard saw his problem as one of chemical substance, of brain modification, or of cultural adaptation, never as a dilemma of his spirit.

  The exorcism was successful. He was freed. But Richard/Rita ended up, as he is today, in an unenviable position: neither male nor female; not a sexual neuter, but, nevertheless, in a no-man’s-land between masculine and feminine.

  Not all the details of his life are pertinent for understanding what happened to him. We need only a relatively few scenes and details of childhood and early teenage. It is the triple stage he passed through as an adult which illustrates to some degree his condition at the time of exorcism.

  Richard/Rita presents in vivid outline the classical puzzle of all possessed people who, though possessed (always to some extent with their consent), still at some point revolt against that very possession. And why should Richard/Rita, and not any of the other transsexuals known to many of us in ordinary life, have been thus possessed in the first place?

  Richard/Rita was born Richard O. in Detroit, Michigan, the third in a family of six children (three boys, three girls). The family lived in a semidetached two-story frame house which stood in a suburban area, predominantly white and upper-income bracket. His mother was Lutheran, his father, Jewish; the children were baptized as Lutherans; but religion did not play a prominent role in the family life. His mother’s Lutheranism was as unimportant to her as Jewishness was unimportant to his father. It was a family in easy financial circumstances, governed with a light hand, and no more or no less self-consciously united than any other on the street.

  Richard’s father worked a regular nine-to-five day in an insurance office, spent most of his free time with the boys. He was a boating and open-air enthusiast, and went fishing and shooting in Canada during summer vacations. First, the two elder boys, Bert and Jasper, and then, when he passed his ninth year, Richard participated in these vacations.

  An ideal held more or less unconsciously by each of the boys was to be like their father—strong, athletic, outdoor. To be a man. Richard’s first memories of this ideal include a day in December when he was in the park with his father walking Flinny, the family dog. He was throwing a ball for the dog to retrieve. As the dog leaped, twisted, caught the ball, and returned running to them, his father remarked that that was how Richard must be—taut, ready to jump and run and catch. The movements of the dog’s body became a rhythm of ideal supremacy and independent strength for Richard: leaping, thrusting, and striving as a well-knit frame in an armor of self-reliance and resilience that absorbed bumps, knocks, cold, heat, swift changes in direction, and sudden bursts of energy. “Look how Flinny throws himself into it all!” he remembers his father’s cry of admiration and encouragement.

  The discordant note in this recollection arises in Richard’s memory of what happened when they returned home. When he saw his mother and his sisters, he felt a struggle in himself; and without understanding why, he was comparing their movements and the sound of their voices with those of his father and of Flinny. But the incident passed as a shadow.

  The three boys were tall and dark in coloring. The girls were small, narrow-waisted, and blonde, like their mother. A family trait shared by all six children with their mother was the uneven earlobe: the right earlobe was noticeably smaller than the left one.

  The girls gravitated, in younger years, to their mother, who never lost a certain apparent dourness, even in her smile and affection. But she had, as well, a hilarious sense of humor sprinkled with irony.

  Each child was sent to kindergarten, then public school, and afterward to college. In their world there was no hint of the social developments which were to mark the 1960s and 1970s. Coast-to-coast television was just on the drawing boards. Female liberation was unborn. Later trends such as unisex and bisexuality were hidden. Homosexuality was still in the closet. Sexual permissiveness and the wholesale dilution of the family as a unit were unknown. The young had not yet been seized by the radicalizing passions of 20 years later. They had not yet started that quick and hazardous trek from infancy into immediate adulthood without any childhood and youth in the traditional sense of those words. Little boys were still little boys, and little girls were still little girls. Nobody had voiced any doubt about that.

  It was Richard himself who felt the first doubts. The first time a change made itself felt in him always remained clear in his memory. One afternoon in the late 1940s, when Richard O. was almost nine years old, he had the first remote intimations of another world utterly different from the one to which he was accustomed.

  Until his summer vacation that year on a small farm belonging to his mother’s brother, some 40 miles outside St. Joseph, Missouri, Richard had never known a day not spent in the asphalt streets, among the city buildings, on the cement pavements, accompanied by the continuous hum of traffic, in Detroit, Michigan. He had never seen geese, turkeys, or chickens. Black walnuts, hickory trees, hazelnuts, sweet corn, pumpkins, rabbits, alfalfa hay, timothy, wild ducks, all the commonplace elements of a farm were novelties that crowded his mind and sensations for the first time. It was, above all, the immensities of the place that seemed to awe him—the clear sky, the Missouri River, the unblocked view of huge stretches of land.

  The incident took place three days before he returned to Detroit. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon. He had spent most of the day on the tractor with his uncle sowing soybeans. Now there remained one more field to be done. It was a long field with a sloping hump running at an angle across its middle. On one of the field’s long sides there was a small pond. On the other side there was the thinning edge of a wood which stretched back for about half a mile. It was Richard’s turn to rest. He lay down among the trees at the edge of the wood and watched as his uncle drove the tractor in long swatches over the central hump from one end of the field to the other.

  These were the last hours of what had been a bright a
nd cloudless day. Across the field and beyond the pond to the west, Richard’s eyes could see the sun setting slowly over the Kansas bluffs. His eyes followed lazily the light of the sun already beginning to slant over the bluffs, down across the 20 or so miles of fields and woods that bordered the Missouri, then across the river and back to the black-brown stretch of the field. He listened to the meadowlarks singing on the edge of the pond. High up in the sky, balancing against the wind from the southwest, a bird hovered. Two sounds, both with their own peculiar rhythm, filled his ears. The noise of the tractor, at first mechanical and clashing, became a lovely thing for him. It rose as his uncle passed by where he lay, then sank again as the tractor climbed the hump, went out of sight on the other side. Then it started to rise again as the tractor climbed the far side of the hump, came into view, and rolled down past him and on to the far right, where it turned and came back to cut another long furrow.

  The other sound was the light evening wind in the elms and maples around him. At first he did not notice it. Then it thrust itself on his consciousness as a rising and falling series of lightly breathed notes. When he lay on his side and looked up, he could see nothing but the gently moving foliage of the trees and the blue sky as a dappled pavement beyond them.

  Almost with no break in his own sensations, he became peculiarly aware of his own body as it lay on the moss and ferns at the edge of the wood. The smell of wild honeysuckle and late May apple flowers mingled with the sharp freshness of some elm leaves he had been twisting and shredding in his hands. He became aware that insects, innumerable to judge from the noise, were droning and buzzing somewhere above his head among the leaves and branches. Everything seemed warm and living; and his body and feelings now appeared to him as part of, not separate from, some throbbing whole, mysterious with its own hidden voices and its shrouded secrets.