by Clark Howard
Emiliano Luza nodded slowly. “What you say may be right, Josefa. Perhaps we have looked upon this tragedy long enough with different eyes. The Lord God knows that I do not enjoy blaming myself for this thing; I do not enjoy seeing blood in the eyes of my only son. Maybe this is to be God’s way of helping both of us to see as you see.”
Emiliano Luza addressed Cloud again. “We will take you to see Glory Ann,” he said gravely.
“If you are interested in the truth, Mr. Luza, you will not regret it,” Cloud promised. “From what Glory Ann tells me, we may be able to learn many things about what happened.”
“From what my sister tells you, you will learn nothing,” Ramón Luza said evenly. “The truth you learn today, you will learn with your eyes.”
“I don’t understand,” Cloud said.
“My sister is confined to an asylum. She has lost her mind.”
Cloud’s expression did not change. Only what he felt inside himself changed.
Cloud went with the Luzas that afternoon to visit the girl at the California State Mental Hospital in Camarillo, forty miles from Reseda. Cloud offered to take the family in the rental car, but Mr. Luza insisted on having Ramón drive their old sedan. He sat in front with his son, and Cloud shared the back seat with Mrs. Luza. Josefa Luza told Cloud how her daughter had reacted after her ordeal in the Hollywood Hills.
“She came home at nearly three o’clock in the morning. We already knew that she was kidnapped because the boy she was out with that evening—Thomas Glenn, an Anglo boy, very nice young boy—had already been to the house with the police and told us. So we were all up, all very nervous:’Miliano, he pace the floor like the night she was born; and Ramón, he cry like a baby because he is so helpless to do anything. I pray. Always I pray. And I wait.”
The car cruised at fifty in the slow lane of the Ventura Freeway. The day was bright; the sunlight spread like a warm yellow blanket over the sloped landscape of Woodland Hills and on to the flatlands of Calabasas.
“A little before three, Gloriana came home. She was pale and trembling. She walked past her father and her brother and came up to me and said, ‘Mamma, I want to wash.’ I took her into the bathroom and helped her wash. While we were in there, she told me what he had made her do. While she was telling me what he made her do with her mouth, she got sick and threw up all over herself. Then we had to wash her again.
“After we got her clean and dressed, we went back to the front room. The police asked to take Gloriana to the hospital to be examined. She was very nervous, so the police let us all go with her. The doctor who examined her said she was all right; the man had not penetrated her body, so Gloriana was still a virgin. She was very bruised down there and in the back, but he said she would be all right. We took her home and put her to bed just as the sun was coming up.”
The once-pretty Chicano woman paused and looked out at the passing landscape. Her face was set, determined, yet deeply sad.
“Mamma, would you like me. to finish telling it?” Ramón asked from the front seat.
“I am all right, my son,” Josefa Luza replied. She took a deep, hollow breath and resumed the story. “That afternoon when Gloriana woke up, we knew there was something wrong with her. Her lips and cheeks were swollen to twice their size and she had a very bad rash all over her mouth. She began to scream and cry that she had caught some terrible disease from the man who had kidnapped her. She begged us to take her back to the doctor and we did. He examined her and told us it was a nervous reaction to what she had experienced. He gave Gloriana a shot and some salve to put on the rash.” Josefa Luza put a brown, wrinkled hand on Cloud’s arm as if to emphasize her next remarks. “From that day forward, Mr. Cloud, my baby was never the same. At first it was just the rash and the swelling; it came and went. Then, after she had to identify the man for the police, her nightmares began. Every night in her sleep she would cry and whimper and beg to be left alone. Sometimes her father and brother and I would stand by her bed and Watch and listen. We knew what she was dreaming, but we were afraid to awaken her. When the nightmares first began, we took her to a psychiatrist, and he said to let them run their course; he did not think they would last long. But we should not wake her up. So all we could do was stand there and watch her suffer in her sleep. Cry and whimper and beg—and then finally plead not to be hurt and say she would do what he wanted. And then—then, my God in heaven, she would began making that terrible—horrible—sound …”
“It was a sucking noise,” Ramón said from the front seat, to save his mother the humiliation of even having to say the word.
“Yes, yes,” Josefa Luza almost hissed. “It was an awful sound, the most awful I ever heard.” The grieved mother buried her face in her wrinkled brown hands and sobbed pitifully.
Cloud, unable to look at her, turned his eyes to the car window.
The hospital lay behind a high fence, halfway between the freeway to the front of it and gently rising hills behind it. The car was stopped at the gate and each passenger required to sign a log; then they parked in a visitors’ parking area and walked to a nearby registration center. At the center they filled out a visitors’ slip and were directed to the office of a doctor who had to approve the visit. The Luzas and Cloud went to the office of Dr. Helen Jacobs, who had been treating Glory Ann at the hospital for nearly three years.
Dr. Jacobs was big-boned, full-bodied woman of fifty who could still turn heads when she walked on the Point Mugu beach in a two-piece swimsuit. Her hair was blonde, clipped haphazardly short, as if she did it herself. She had an excellent figure and strikingly direct blue eyes. In her office, with the Luzas and Cloud sitting in front of her desk, she professionally appraised the stranger that Glory Ann’s family had brought with them.
“Exactly what is it you intend to write about Glory Ann, Mr. Cloud?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Doctor,” Cloud replied. “I had no idea the young lady was in a mental institution. My original intent had been to interview her—”
“That, of course, is quite out of the question,” Dr. Jacobs said. “You would be able to elicit no coherent response from her whatsoever.” She continued to study him as she spoke. “Since you can’t interview the girl, what do you propose to do?”
“I’m open to suggestions, Doctor.”
Dr. Jacobs pursed her lips. “What, may I ask, was to be the purpose of your story?”
“If I had been able to interview her,” Cloud said, “I would have concentrated primarily on her feelings about Weldon Whitman today, what she thinks of his repeated denials that he was the man who kidnapped her, things like that. But any story I do now will have to be more documentary: what her condition is, your prognosis of her condition, and so on.”
“Please, Doctor,” said Emiliano Luza, speaking in the office for the first time. “Before Mr. Cloud writes his story, we would like for him to see Glory Ann.”
“Do you mean face to face?” Dr. Jacobs asked.
“If you will permit it, yes.”
The doctor tapped an index finger pensively against her upper lip for a moment, then said, “Yes, I think so. It’s almost time to measure her progress again anyway. Using a stranger like Mr. Cloud will give us a good gut reaction to go by.”
“What are you talking about, Doctor?” Cloud asked. Dr. Jacobs rose and walked around the desk.
“Come along and find out,” she said.
Helen Jacobs led the way through an enclosed walkway connecting the doctors’ offices with the hospital buildings. “This is G Ward,” she told Cloud as she used an electronic card key to open a controlled door. “It’s a segregated female ward for borderline behavioral cases. Women who are normally nonviolent in nature, but who have emotional action levers which are easily tripped, causing the subject to undergo immediate and marked mental agitation and physical excitability.”
They proceeded down a wide corridor between treatment, examination, and therapy rooms. They turned into a narrower hall containing small, pri
vate rooms where patients could be observed under controlled conditions. Each of the rooms was equipped with a frame of unbreakable one-way observation glass set in the front wall next to the door.
At Room G-8, Dr. Jacobs unlocked a control panel and turned an illumination switch; the frame of glass became diaphanous, allowing them to watch Glory Ann. A second switch opened a ceiling transmitter which allowed them also to listen to the patient. The Luza family stood to one side to allow Cloud to step up close to the window. Dr. Jacobs stood next to him.
“Glory Ann Luza,” she said clinically. “Female, Mexican-American by naturalization; age, nearly twenty-two; height, five feet one inch; weight, one hundred and nine; I.Q., low average; education, three-and-a-half years of high school; present physical condition, excellent; bodily functions, normal; mental condition—” she paused, as if the word she were about to say simply did not fit. But she had no choice, it had to be said. “Mental condition, schizoid.”
Cloud stared into the room. Glory Ann Luza was’ dark, pretty, with flawless skin and large eyes like plums. She was wearing a flowered cotton dress, white anklets, and sandals. She sat on the room’s single bed, a sketchpad on her lap. Humming softly to herself, she worked at drawing a picture with colored pencils. Around her on the bed were sketches, completed drawings, and finally colored pictures that she had finished. They were of church steeples, chapels, altars, and other religious subjects.
Cloud turned to Helen Jacobs. “Schizoid. Doesn’t that have something to do with split personality?”
“That’s an oversimplification,” Dr. Jacobs said. “In Glory Ann’s case it amounts to a psychotic disorder that causes her to lose contact with her present environment.”
“Lose contact how?” he asked.
“Why don’t I show you?” Dr. Jacobs said. She quietly unlocked the door. “Go into the room and speak to her.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes. Say anything you like, in just a normal voice.”
Cloud glanced uneasily at the Luza family, who were still standing slightly back from the window. An odd feeling of apprehension slipped over him; his whole being warned him that he was not going to like what was to come. Nevertheless, he had come this far to learn the truth about Glory Ann Luza; he certainly was not going to stop on the threshold of that truth. Reluctant but determined, he entered the room.
The young woman sitting on the side of the bed had her back to Cloud. Humming softly, she went on with her sketching. Cloud stepped to the foot of the bed.
“Hello, Glory Ann,” he said quietly.
The young woman leaped from the bed and whirled around, dropping her sketchpad and spilling her pencils on the floor. Her eyes widened fearfully. Her lips began to twitch.
“Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you,” Cloud said as gently as he could.
Suddenly Glory Ann went berserk. She screamed a terrified, stricken scream and flung herself into the farthest corner of the little room. Cringing there like a trapped animal, she alternately clutched at her throat with both hands and then clawed at the wall as if trying to dig her way to escape from some pursuing demon. All the while she continued to scream at a frantic pitch—screams filled with such intense dread that they were like needles being pushed into Cloud’s nerve ends.
Cloud looked pleadingly at the window panel, knowing that the Luzas and Helen Jacobs were watching him. He took a tentative step toward the possessed girl, saw her try to literally force her body into the wall, heard her screams grow more gruesome, and quickly retreated from her. He turned back to the door and hurried from the room.
Outside, he leaned against the door, pale and shaken. “Did you get enough gut reaction out of that?” he angrily asked Dr. Jacobs.
“Yes, I did,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Such experiments are necessary from time to time to tell us whether we are making any progress with the patient. Ordinarily I would have used a male orderly for the guinea pig, but since you wanted a story, well—”
“Don’t you have any other way of measuring your progress? That poor kid is probably butting her head against the wall by now!”
“Calm down, Mr. Cloud,” said Helen Jacobs. “Come back over here.”
Cloud stepped back to the observation window.
“Look,” said the doctor.
Cloud looked into the room. Glory Ann Luza was back on the bed, sketching quietly, humming softly.
“It is called an Adam syndrome,” Dr. Jacobs explained. “It is, in its simplest sense, a violent emotional reaction to any exposure to a man. Any man—even her own father, her brother.”
Cloud was back in the doctor’s office, sitting before her desk. The Luza men were waiting in the visitors’ lounge; Josefa Luza was visiting her daughter in the little room.
“I believe her condition has grown out of some deep-seated guilt feelings which manifested themselves following her attack by the Spotlight Bandit. I don’t think it was the attack itself, mind you, but rather what happened after the attack.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Doctor,” Cloud said.
“All right, let me explain it this way. At the time of her kidnap experience, Glory Ann was eighteen. She was not overly mature for her age, almost totally inexperienced insofar as sex was concerned. She had been exposed to the usual health and hygiene classes in high school, had probably read a sex book or two out of curiosity, was familiar with the common four-letter words, and so on; but I don’t believe she ever personally indulged in any sex play herself, and it is my personal opinion that she had never even masturbated. It appears that she was a very religious girl, very close to the sisters where she went to school, and even seriously considering becoming a nun herself.”
Helen Jacobs rummaged in a large purse on her desk for a pack of cigarettes. She took one out and Cloud leaned across the desk to light it for her.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling briefly and exhaling. “All right, that’s the picture of Glory Ann Luza as she was the night she went to the dance and then parked in the hills to neck or whatever they call it these days. Now, along comes the Spotlight Bandit and kidnaps her. He drives her to an isolated place and holds her captive for two hours. During that time he forces her to take off all her clothes and submit to numerous sexual violations and indignities. This, naturally, was a terrible shock to her sensibilities—but not something she couldn’t survive. The immediate results of the experience were the swelling and rash, and the subsequent nightmares. Both were temporary conditions; both, I believe, would have gradually and normally been alleviated by the passage of time—if the matter had been let alone.”
“Let alone by whom?” Cloud asked.
“By everyone,” the doctor said emphatically. “By her mother, her father, her brother, the family priest, all the nuns at her school, the police, the district attorney’s office—everybody. If they had all let her alone, I believe she would have recovered completely, physically and emotionally, in two or three months.” She paused to drag almost belligerently on her cigarette. “But they didn’t leave her alone. They made her describe her ordeal over and over again to strangers and in front of strangers. They made her appear in open court not once but twice, and publicly admit what she had been a party to—an unwilling party, certainly; that was made very clear. But the fact that she didn’t want to suck Weldon Whitman’s penis didn’t alter the fact that she did it; the fact that she didn’t want to have anal intercourse with him didn’t alter the fact that he did it to her. Neither his forcing of her nor her being forced changed the actuality of what happened between them—and it was that actuality that she was compelled time and again to admit, to relate, to describe. Then, finally, the ultimate humiliation: to actually have her story questioned as if she were lying about it; and not only questioned, but, because he was conducting his own defense, questioned by the very man who had subjected her to the abuse in the first place.”
“What you’re saying,” Cloud suggested, “is that Glory Ann’s present sta
te is just as much the fault of the prosecution and the court as it is the fault of Weldon Whitman.”
“Oh, no!” Dr. Jacobs said quickly. “No, no, definitely not. The prosecution and the courts, the family, the priest, anyone else involved with the girl, did what they did out of ignorance. None of those people would have deliberately harmed the girl. But the Spotlight Bandit did deliberately harm her. The contributory harm to her emotional condition may be divided, for the sake of discussion; but make no mistake about the guilt factor, Mr. Cloud: it is Weldon Whitman’s—and his alone.”
“But you do believe that the trial and all the rest were also harmful to her?”
“Definitely.” The doctor finished her cigarette and tamped it out in an ashtray. “I believe she could easily have coped with what happened to her if she had not been required by our legal processes to display it in public. To her, what happened was a dreadful, shameful thing. When she had to participate in making a production, a public spectacle, of that shame, she began to protect herself by retreating back into her own mind. It was as natural a process as the clotting of blood. With each subsequent incident of exposure, she retreated a little farther. And as she retreated, she began to shut out associations with male figures. This was all done subconsciously, very subtly; it probably began with relatively insignificant acts: not staying in the same room with her father or brother, declining dates, refusing to sit next to a man on a bus or in a theater—that sort of thing. But as her condition became progressively worse, she actually devised ways to avoid men: hiding when her father called her, lying that she had no appetite in order to avoid sitting at the dinner table, going back and forth across streets to keep from passing a man on the sidewalk. The day finally came when the last thread holding her to reality was broken; after that the mere sight of a man triggered the extreme reaction you saw earlier, and the girl was committed.”
“What’s your prognosis for her, Doctor?” Cloud asked.