“That’s ridiculous, Counselor.” Bethany was laughing on cue. “Stewart cannot legally consent to pedophilia.”
She had a big point there, technically.
“By imposing adult sensibilities on a fifteen-year-old,” Hockey said, unsure about this one, “the state was inadvertently adding to his difficulties.”
“Adults are the state,” South said. “No compromise.”
Bethany beamed. The girl was a real brat. She must have been a cheerleader in high school. “Stew’s parents begged the local social worker to remove him to juvenile detention, but the state refused.”
“It was his professional judgment.” Judge South was weakening. Why?
“That Stew could handle the distress?” Hockey was on Bethany’s team now. “I don’t think so. Stew’s relationship with Dave was the happiest thing in his life. His family didn’t want him. He’s gay. Other gay people are his family.” Goddammit, Eva. The Mulcaheys didn’t flinch. They were comatose.
But Bethany was on top of it. “Blaming the family is not going to get you anywhere. The family has suffered enough because of your client. They have suffered the violation of their son and the death of their beloved grandson. Because of him.” Stew’s mother started to weep.
“You know it’s malpractice,” Hockey said. It sounded lame, but actually it was true. That was the only leg he had to stand on, after all. The coerced confession. “The coerced confession is invalid,” he repeated. “That is obvious to all parties.”
“Nine years,” South said, giving in. So that was what he was afraid of: making the cops look bad. “Possibility of parole. Minus time served.”
“He’ll be out in five years,” the FBI guy grumbled.
“Five years too long.” Hockey felt good.
“All right, all right, you got your way, Counselor. Lieutenant Bart, remand the prisoner.”
David had seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open through the whole volley, but when Bart led him out of his chair, he didn’t even look at Hockey, an act Hockey found to be deliberate and contrived. David could have at least been grateful. They all watched, embarrassed, as David stumbled and slowly walked toward the door. Then he stopped, like he’d lost something, and turned toward Stew.
“Save yourself, Stewie,” he mumbled weakly. He started to cry, and the guard took him away. A crying pedophile.
It was embarrassing. Everyone was uncomfortable. Stew looked up from his place at the table, in the same prison jumpsuit, same black slippers.
Everyone turned to look at the boy.
“I don’t know how,” he said back to them.
“Miss Bliss,” Bernie South moved on. “Your case is going to trial.”
“I want to plead guilty,” the boy croaked.
What was this? Hockey stared at Stew. What a nightmare for Bethany. Shut up, kid, he was thinking. He wanted to put his hand over Stew’s little cock-sucking mouth.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bethany said, losing it. “That man molested you. You weren’t in your right mind.”
“I’ll never say that.” Stew’s face was contorted; he hated himself.
Shut up. Hockey was screaming inside. Then he said it. “Stop him.”
“Stew,” his mother leaked. “It’s the medication they’re giving you. It’s messing up your head.”
“Don’t do this, Stew.” That was the father now. A big, lumbering guy. This time he appeared a bit stranger than at the last hearing. Not so normal as before. “You’ll get over it. They’ll put you in a hospital.” He touched his son. “I’m like you.” I’m like you, he whispered, but Hockey knew he didn’t mean gay. It was strangely moving somehow, to see this father try to connect with someone he drove insane. Hockey watched his sincerity. Marty was pleading. It was both tragic and pathetic. Hockey knew what he was seeing, someone who postponed love until it was too late. Here was the result.
Marty whispered to his son, the killer. “Just plead insanity and I’ll be the only friend you’ll ever need.”
“Your Honor.…” Bethany said, stalling.
“I’m guilty,” Stew said. “I don’t know why this happened. It just did. I am the worst of all. That’s why.”
“This is too much,” South said. “I’m going to send this prisoner back to the holding cell. Counselor, get your house in order and we’ll reconvene tomorrow.”
“Yes, thank you, Your Honor.” She wanted to kill.
The judge stood and left them behind. Then the guard picked up Stew by the arm and pulled the shuffling boy out of the office.
“I’m not a bad man,” Marty Mulcahey said to no one in particular. “I didn’t know what to do. I did my best. You can’t control your children. They make their own decisions. I talked to him. I went to see the counselor. I asked him to lay off. He decided not to. All we wanted to do was watch TV, talk to the kids on the phone every now and then. They’d come over once in a while, get married, take care of themselves. Nothing serious.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Brigid Mulcahey said.
“He’s not blaming himself.” Hockey watched himself talk. “In fact, he’s taking no responsibility whatsoever.”
“Shut up,” Brigid said.
Hockey looked at Bethany. She was a cold bitch.
“Whatever happens, Mrs. Mulcahey,” Hockey said. “You’ll never be as bad as Stew. It doesn’t matter what you do. Now you can blame Stew. You don’t have to blame yourself.”
Brigid’s eyes glazed over and she looked away. She was not going to engage that. “Everyone’s life is ruined,” she said. And then she felt better.
33
Eva didn’t know what to pack. She’d ordered the wrong ticket and had gone to the wrong airport. She’d worn the wrong shirt.
Everything was in place to make a bad impression, but she knew, really, that it didn’t matter. Whatever trip Mary was on, it was so deep that Eva’s charisma wasn’t a factor. But she had to try. She couldn’t just watch and wait.
How could Eva have ever considered refusing to try? It was the worst decision she had ever made in her life. It was the most meaningless. She should have gotten on the plane that first day.
Mary wasn’t some girlfriend like “My apartment, my girlfriend, my job.” Mary was the love of her life. When Mary walked into the room, Eva smiled. She was always happy to see her, even if Mary was being horrible. Relationship wasn’t even the right word. It was demeaning. Nothing else mattered. When she imagined living without Mary, she imagined nothing.
Eva stumbled out of the excessively long flight. Two changes, in Chicago and Denver. Then she rented one of those white rental cars. Eva tried to drive, but she really didn’t know how. She had gotten a licence a couple of years back, but had not had much chance to practise. And the roads were so confusing here. There were no signs and no cross streets. There was no one walking along whom she could ask about directions, and there was no store or anything to pull into and ask the lady behind the counter.
It was all one great whoosh of drivers in the know. All the others already understood exactly where they were going and how to get there. They were beyond needing street signs, and the exits came up so fast, Eva didn’t have time to get into the right lane. This wasn’t a shtick on her part. This was real. She got caught in the tangle and couldn’t get out of it, until she ended up in some place called Encinitas. That wasn’t Del Sol. Finally she saw a 7-Eleven and got directions.
“Back onto the highway,” the cashier said. She looked like Mary.
Eva bought a piece of red licorice and some cigarettes and stood in front of the 7-Eleven watching the cars zoom by. Anything was possible. Love creates worlds, that’s the truth. She knew what she and Mary had between them was far more precious than all else she had ever seen or could imagine. That had to stand for something.
Eva smoked a cigarette and watched the cars. How weird—there was nothing else to look at. No people. Then she threw out the pack. No more cigarettes, no more licorice. She went back inside and
bought water. It was a small bottle, a nice fit in her hand. She could get used to anything. Eva got back in the car and pulled out to the freeway.
Love creates worlds.
Right now Mary didn’t have faith, but Eva had enough for two. Eva was not afraid of the person Mary was becoming. She loved her, so she could understand. Eva believed in Mary. She knew Mary could do it.
As she drove along, Eva saw the ocean out of the corner of her eye, and then suddenly she came upon it, some kind of coastal road. It was gorgeous, sucking up her anxiety. She’d come to see her true love, Mary. How could she fail? Everyone needs someone to believe in, and Eva believed in her.
This was Southern California. Soon she’d be a health nut. She’d drink Calistoga and take classes in competitive yoga.
No plans, no cigarettes, no causes, no hope.
Just Mary and the beach and a lush backyard.
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
The novel you hold in your hand was ready for publication in 1999. It reflects a world of perceptions and values firmly grounded in that year. I am very disappointed that neither you nor I had the opportunity to experience each other through this novel in the historic moment in which it was meant to be read.
Prior to writing The Child, I published seven novels and two nonfiction books between 1984 and 1998. Why was this book so suddenly unacceptable?
There are people who believe that we live in a merit-based publishing environment. For them, the reason I could not find publication was because The Child is less deserving than every novel that has been published in the last eight years. And that, therefore, it objectively deserved to remain unavailable to readers.
I, however, have always believed that individual experience is dynamic with its social context.
First, many editors’ letters explicitly pointed to the relationship between Stew and David as the reason for rejection. What troubled the editors was my point of view. I did not come out “against” the relationship. Instead I was, as Patricia Powell says in her blurb for this edition, “objective.” There is art about what could be, what should be, but there is also art about what is. I feel that the individual discomfort of particular editors about this sexual content was dynamic, with a national trend towards a narrowing of the range of ideas that can be expressed in public. The two Bush presidencies were met by a dumbing down of discourse in mainstream media. There were many times when I felt that I could not hear truthful or complex ideas in public. I could only hear them in private. Economic realities like the mergers of publishing venues resonate negatively with the trend towards fewer ideas. I experience The Child as the place where my lifelong project of expanding representation crashed into the country’s shrinking space for new discourse.
Second, the relationship between Stew and David was written against the story of a lesbian lawyer, her lover, and her legal partner. I have written widely about the ways and reasons that lesbian literature is disrespected in America, and I do not have the opportunity to fully replicate that information here. However, I do think it is fair to say that modern lesbian literature made cultural inroads as a consequence of the feminist and lesbian movements of the 1970s and’80s. The cultural conservatism of the 1990s and one of its expressions: niche marketing (see my book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, Duke University Press, 1998) was a containing reaction to that expansive trend.
In this current environment, many of America’s best and most respected editors have never published a lesbian novel. The most successful lesbian writers are either closeted or don’t have lesbian content. As a writing teacher, I encounter many young women who are deliberately not writing lesbian content because of the chilling effect of the industry’s indifference and neglect. MFA faculties are often not equipped to offer lesbian writers the same kinds of knowledgeable support that straight or gay male work can receive. Writers developing outside of an institutional framework, as I did, no longer have community-based events like Outwrite or Lesbian Writers Conferences to help them develop. Niche marketing continues to keep lesbian literature from being considered an integrated part of American letters. Today, the best-selling lesbian writers in America are British imports. An examination of gay book award nomination lists reveals that the best presses in this country have shown a frightening, extremely dramatic decline in their publication of lesbian novels over the last fifteen years.
What makes the fragility of lesbian content dynamic with the narrowing of public discourse is that publishing lesbian literature means representing Points of View that are unknown. In a conservative time, most books, films, and television shows re-create perspectives that are already known. The familiarity itself becomes the sign of “quality.” In an expansive era, the introduction of new ways of thinking is what is praised as “good.” But, in our day, the “new” is so rare and unsettling that many people think it is “wrong.” And Point of View, not Story, is the most politically charged question in American arts. How a moment is perceived and experienced by the character, her right to be the authorial center of her own universe, is what is at question.
I believe that these are the reasons that the publication of this book was so obstructed.
Now for the thank-yous:
I feel enormous gratitude to you, the readers. Twenty-three years after the appearance of my first novel in 1984, rarely a week passes that I do not receive a letter, phone call, email, or personal comment that something I have written has been meaningful in someone else’s life. This knowledge gives me strength. Thank you so much, readers, for that precious engagement.
In this period, (1999-2007), after fifteen years of work in avantgarde theater (1979-1994), I transitioned to writing for mainstream theater, and began to have plays developed and produced by supportive individuals, including Tim Sanford at Playwrights Horizons, Robert Blacker and Philip Himberg and The Sundance Theater Lab, Shirley Fishman and Des McAnuff at The La Jolla Playhouse, and Seth Gordon at The Cleveland Playhouse. I am very grateful to these institutions and individuals for their support. In 2002 I received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwrighting, which gave me the recognition that I needed to find the strength to keep fighting for the right of authentic lesbian representation to be part of American intellectual life. I have received lifelong support from the MacDowell Colony. In fact I am writing this note at MacDowell, in the very studio where, twenty-one years ago, I wrote my third novel, After Delores. I am very thankful to The Corporation at Yaddo, for their sustained support. And to the Puffin Foundation, and the Paul Anderson Foundation, which provided me with a Stonewall Award, thanks to the support of Kate Clinton. I am deeply grateful to these foundations and the corrective that they provide to industrial gatekeepers.
I never stopped working as an active participant citizen, most directly in my more-than-twenty-year collaboration with Jim Hubbard. Just as the doors were closing on lesbian fiction, Jim and I embarked on The Act Up Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org). Thank you Jim for your friendship, understanding, and commitment.
Thank you to Meg Wolitzer.
In 2004, I ran into my friend Diamanda Galas, the great composer and performer, at a coffee place in our shared neighborhood. I told her that I had been struggling for many years to publish a highly engaged novel, and I explained the content and point of view and why they made the book unacceptable. Diamanda told me that she was going to phone a gay male friend of hers who was an editor and tell him–as she memorably put it–“Treat this sister with respect.”
This is how Don Weise, of Carroll and Graf, came to this novel and decided to publish it. Thank you Don and thank you so much, Diamanda.
Gratitude to all my true friends, and you know who you are, especially: KT, Julie, Leslie, Jack and Peter, Nuar, Claudia and John and my godchild Ula, Jackie, Gina, Bina, Rabih, Allison and Amy, Heidi, (Uncle) Bob, Erica and Simon, Kevin and Dodie, my cousins: Marcia, Amotz, Gala, Alon, and Ori, my pals at work, my neighbors, Patrick, Dudley, Jessica, Tay
ari, Mardi, Michael, Michael and Steve, Alex, Roz, Larry and Scott, Annie, Ronnie, Patty and Cynthia, Yehudit and Tal, Linda and Jana, Gaelle, Genevieve, Susan, Audrey, Alix, Adrian, and my darling the late John Belusso. Thank you for being accountable and for keeping your promises.
—Sarah Schulman
March 2007
Sarah Schulman is the author of eleven books: the novels The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, Girls, Visions and Everything, and The Sophie Horowitz Story, the nonfiction works Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America and My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, and the play Carson McCullers. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. Her awards include a Guggenheim, Fullbright, two American Library Association Book Awards, and she was a Finalist for the Prix de Rome. She lives in New York.
THE CHILD
Copyright © 2007 by Sarah Schulman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means–graphic, electronic or mechanical–without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.
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