Concrete Angel

by Patricia Abbott

  Cy was a heavy-set man, the kind of guy who was always hiking up his pants, tucking in his shirt, sweating even in winter. He was also balding and wore thick dark glasses completely obscuring his face. No, he wasn’t Mother’s type. She’d require certain things from Cy, but not others.

  I was silent, trying hard to get the childishly mistaken picture of Mother in bed with my grandfather out of my head. The words from your father’s bed to mine were difficult to excise from my twelve-year old brain.

  It’d already occurred to me that Cy’s addition to our household, if he married my mother, might take some of the pressure off me. I’d had a good taste of what life alone with her was like over the course of my parents’ many separations, and it was wearying. There was always a problem to solve, a slight to be dealt with, Mother’s schemes to be derailed, a place to be found for her newest junk. Junk. We haven’t gotten into her junk yet.

  But now I’d found out Cy was married and unlikely to move in and care for us. And he was not Mother’s type. His shoes weren’t shined. He was fat. He’d fade from our lives quickly once she no longer needed him.

  “I kind of like Cy,” I said faintly. “Maybe he’ll get divorced.” A grandfatherly sort of man might suit us both.

  “Fat chance,” she said with a shrug.

  Mother went on to let me in on the entire divorce proceedings. The drama of the hearing came across much like one of the boxing matches Daddy liked to watch on Saturday nights.

  Pow! “I’m not picking up your wardrobe expenses. You have enough clothing to get you into the nineteen eighties. Scratch that—your eighties.”

  Wham! “You can’t see Christine on school nights, and I’m keeping the Thunderbird.”

  Zing! “That T-Bird was a birthday gift from my parents. You can take the Dart Swinger.”

  “Swell, you want me carting your kid around in that heap. I can dent it with my elbow.”

  If there were to be no more boxing matches, perhaps we could watch Carol Burnett in peace. But calm, with or without Daddy, didn’t last long.

  Back to the crime scene: two hours after the soda salesman’s death, I told two police officers I’d found Jerry Santini strangling my mother in the living room and pulled the gun Daddy bought for us from the drawer.

  “I only meant to scare him,” I said, caught in the excitement of the scene and more than half-believing it, “but confusion ensued and the gun went off.”

  Mature words for a child of twelve, but nobody flinched. I was the sort of child who might say such a thing. “I was barely aware of pulling the trigger,” I finished, borrowing Mother’s idea, which had left an impression. The notion of the murder being dreamlike felt like a good way to go. “I think I was in a fug state.”

  “Fugue,” Cy corrected me, nodding in the background. I told them what he’d instructed me to say, telling the police officers as little as possible. I was a bit shrill in my delivery, but shrillness established my immaturity—I couldn’t seem too well-prepared, too precocious. Reticence was Cy’s advice for any situation allowing it. And ladylike tears, if needed.

  I didn’t mind lying for Mother—I was already dedicated to an existence of small fibs and truth-shading with neighbors, teachers, grandmothers, Daddy. And it turned out I was pretty good at lying and would grow more skilled over time. When Mother lied, she prattled on. I was the essence of brevity, my tears restrained.

  I looked to her for approval, but she kept her eyes pinned on the wall behind me where a chartreuse and aqua ceramic señorita and señor she’d bought at Gimbel’s danced the tango. Surreal hues enveloped us, but I was on my own in her neon setting. Neither its brilliance nor hers would fade for years.

  Our apartment had a hushed air despite the crowd of men examining the carpet, looking for the bullets’ casings, powdering the place for fingerprints, talking to Mother and me, snapping cameras and, finally, carrying Jerry Santini away. A child murderess merits solemnity. Nobody pushed me beyond my practiced confession that day or on any other day over the following weeks. Ordinary men, like cops in 1976, didn’t anticipate a mother asking her child to lie—even after the Johnny Stompanato case.

  To be honest, I can’t remember either Mother or Cy Granholm openly asking it of me—either the lying or taking the rap. It somehow evolved in the hour after Cy arrived and before he called the police. His attempts to cobble a convincing story from Mother’s words went awry every time.

  “You are amazingly cavalier about what’s taken place here tonight, Eve,” he said, wiping his forehead. “You did kill the guy. Right? Unloaded the entire gun into his gut? I’m not misunderstanding?” He paced the floor like the bulldog he was.

  I could sympathize with Cy. It was hard to remember the fatal events had occurred only an hour earlier given Mother’s body language. And as Mother swayed back and forth between anger, helplessness, and a sort of superhuman strength, I tried hard to match it. Were we to play the victims, were we to be hysterical? Sorrowful? Temporarily insane? It was so hard to keep the strategy straight.

  “Truthfully, Cy,” her eyes fluttered, “I don’t remember a damned thing. Not until Christine was standing here beside me.” She looked at him, her lashes damp, her lips slightly parted. “And what else could I do?” she added, forgetting herself for a second and changing her tone yet again. “For a lousy twenty bucks, that jerk was willing to see me hang. What’s twenty bucks?”

  “You sound like a prostitute, Eve,” Cy said, frowning. “A cheap one too.”

  “Now that you mention it, he didn’t even buy me dinner. I fed him, in fact.”

  Cy and I sighed simultaneously, fearing she would indeed hang if she made such comments, so I stepped in with my special skill-set. Saving Mother was something I was born to do. It had come into play with great regularity in my twelve years.

  Everyone believed me—seemed eager to, in fact. My statement, as they called it, was met with subtle sighs of relief, of feet shuffling noisily in tight shoes, the funny crinkling noise nylon stockings used to make, the slight inhale of breath as what I was saying went from nebulous to cogent, the squeak of chairs as people sat down and started to write—relief that the entire sordid episode could be wrapped up quickly.

  A sort of giddy freedom set in. No one would have to haul Mother off to jail. No one would have to press against her body to put cuffs on her hands, touching, inadvertently, something under the transparent negligee that Cy made her keep on. No one would push her head down as she entered the police vehicle. No man-handling would occur.

  I thought back to the three of us looking out the fly-specked window a few weeks earlier, wondering why only Daddy saw the danger festering below. But nothing bad would happen to Mother. Not when I was so willing to play the looney daughter. Not when it was clear I’d misunderstood the adult events transpiring in the next room. Got it wrong when I’d come in on a scene, mistaking ardor for violence. Mistaking shrieks of passion for those of fear. It was a nicely fashioned story I told.

  I was eventually ordered to see a court-appointed shrink and that was it from a legal standpoint. There was no trial since I’d pleaded guilty, just a cozy hearing in the judge’s chamber. The story never appeared in any newspaper. If it spread at all, it was over the telephone, through whispers in grocery store checkout lines, and over backyard fences in the blocks of row houses of my grandmother’s neighborhood.

  Jerry Santini was found to be an exceptionally solitary man, someone whose origins weren’t ever fully discovered. He’d come to Philly in the fifties following a stint in Korea, worked for a national soda manufacturing company, lived alone in a small apartment in the northeast section of the city. But beyond this scant history—nothing. No family members or friends came forward to ask questions, to demand justice.

  Daddy’s family was influential in the community; the soda salesman, an almost itinerant salaried worker, was not. Mother chose both the right guy to marry and the right one to kill. And most importantly, she mothered the correct daughter to s
ave her, wrapping me around her crime like the needy girl I was.

  The judge gave me some stern admonitions and scolded my parents for keeping a loaded gun in the house. My father assured him the gun hadn’t been loaded when he put it in the drawer some weeks earlier; the bullets were in a separate package, the safety on. Possessions in Daddy’s control were always maintained as they should be. Except for his former wife.

  “I taught Eve how to use it myself,” Daddy told the judge. “We went together to a shooting range in northeast Philly. A good shot, too. Steady hand, great eye.” For a minute, he sounded boastful, but then he glared at my mother. “And Eve knew damned well not to keep it loaded with a kid in the house.”

  Your kid, I mouthed silently. Once again, he reminded the judge that his part in all this had been well-executed. It was my mother and me who screwed things up. We made the mess, not he. Not once did Daddy express any doubt about either Mother’s story or mine, but he must have questioned its truth. He must have. The judge nodded approvingly at every word he said. I wondered if they attended the same private schools and college, belonged to the same fraternity. They were that much alike.

  I also couldn’t help but wonder exactly when Mother had loaded the gun since she’d been so dismissive of my father’s purchase, shoving it in the drawer with no outward interest. But no one else looked bothered by such facts. In fact, few questions were asked as we went through our rehearsed scene. The notion of a scripted play occurred to me.

  But then my mother stepped forward, suddenly denying laying a hand on the weapon. “I don’t think I consciously knew the gun was in the drawer. And I certainly never touched it.” She waved her arms around as if indicating the gun could have been anywhere in the apartment, anywhere in the world as far as she knew. Cy’s eyes fluttered in alarm at this diversion from the script. I could see his hand itching to clamp itself over her mouth.

  A forensics report, read aloud by the judge, contradicted what she’d said, announcing her fingerprints had been found on the gun. Thinking quickly when her preservation was at stake, Mother instantly recalled taking it from my shaking hands.

  “Christine was nearly paralyzed with horror at what she’d done. I had to pry it loose from her frozen fingers, terrified it’d go off again.”

  Cy signaled her to stop speaking with a jabbing slash of his hand. She’d already said far more than he’d advised. I could see the indecision in Mother’s eyes because she thought her account of the events was going well, and she didn’t like ceding her minutes on the stage. But finally she did stop speaking, her mouth closing so quickly you could hear her jawbones protest. A collective sigh drifted across the small room, all of us enervated by what we’d heard, all of us relieved it hadn’t gone too badly.

  During those moments, I could nearly remember pulling the gun from the drawer. I could feel Mother’s hands on mine, prying the gun loose. I watched, transfixed by my imagination, as the revolver fell to the floor emptied of bullets. I think we all saw it her way for a minute; the drama of her account was compelling, convincing.

  She grew more persuasive over time since I halfway believed the entire story at some point. Or part of me did. It was always easier to believe Mother, always better to go along with whatever she said or wanted or did. I wondered what my father thought. Did he think he had sired a murderess or married one? Did he care? He avoided my eyes, and I, his.

  I also wondered if all of the hearings that took place in the judge’s chambers were set pieces like ours. Were there rehearsals to keep things from getting out of hand—insuring the person who’d been coached or coaxed to take the fall was locked away so the book could be closed? Were all court decisions made like this one?

  Mother and I shared moments of intense intimacy for years to come, but none would match the neon brilliance of the night she killed Jerry Santini. How could they?

  Mother drove me to Dr. Bailey’s office in her cherry-colored Impala (a trade-in and trade-up) each week, and soon every other week, and eventually once a month. We entered his office together: Mother, a flurry of pastel fragrant with Chanel No. 5, her blonde hair poufy, a discreet amount of eye shadow, a touch of lipstick. I was a blander rendition since I lacked both her confidence and figure.

  No one but Dr. Bailey monitored my behavior. Children were still ceded some protection from the media glare unless you were Lana Turner’s kid. At school, I continued my long-standing role as the too-smart girl who kept to herself. It was safer to play it like that. None of my classmates asked about my summer vacation, but it was a new school and I had few friends. For once I was happy to be one of the anonymous ones in middle school—one of those kids who walked home alone looking at the ground, kicking at the leaves so they appeared occupied in thought rather than lonely. If anyone accompanied me, it was the boy with his glasses held together with tape, the new girl who didn’t know anyone yet, a stray dog sniffing at my heels.

  Mother and I sat side by side on Dr. B’s slightly faded black-and-white checkered loveseat until his door opened. Mother would immediately fix her best evil eye on his, daring him to undermine her. I marched into his office week after week and told him stories of my pre-teenage crushes, my straight As in school, my bouts with insomnia—all material perfected beforehand by Mother, an expert in such details. It was a rare occasion when an uncharted sentence escaped my lips.

  Some of the material she invented sent us into giggling fits the night before a session.

  “See if he doesn’t have a cow over this incident,” Mother’d say when she thought of a particularly good idea—a colorful line to sling at him. “I bet he’ll do his little cough when he hears it.”

  I enjoyed the camaraderie these visits necessitated, loved having Mother’s attention for hours more than usual each week. Only later would I realize her manipulation of my therapy made it impossible for those sessions to do me any good.

  Though I was not a murderer, I badly needed someone’s help, someone who might shine a light on my relationship with my mother, tell me it wasn’t normal for a mother to see her daughter as someone to manipulate, to use. Such insight from a therapist skilled in breaking through a façade might have saved me years of pain.

  But when I told Dr. B something even remotely troubling, he coughed lightly, guiding me, through respiratory cues, to a safer topic. Confronting my mother on any issue inadvertently arising in his office was not in his playbook. His unintentional collusion with Mother in manufacturing a fairly safe neurosis for me might just as well have been deliberate.

  “Tell yourself a story,” he suggested when I complained about not sleeping. Or, “Those straight A’s will get you into a fine college.”

  Banalities and set pieces of advice were the only therapeutic tools I saw. It’d been decided at some point I misunderstood what I saw in my living room. And that I was not a murderer. Instead I was a frightened child protecting her mother.

  After each session, Mother and I went for a hot-fudge sundae, or a lime rickey, or a cheesesteak and fries. Anything I wanted. And there I’d report on my session more fully.

  “I love your father paying for it all,” she said once. “Makes the whole thing worthwhile.” The haze of cigarette smoke, exhaled unhurriedly from her pink lips, engulfed our table. Those were some of the most intimate moments in my life.

  “Worthwhile?”

  She shrugged. “Turning dross into gold—something like that.”

  I wondered, too, if by “the whole thing” she meant Jerry’s death or my being thought of as a murderess. But probably it was the burden of driving me to his office and wasting her Saturday mornings. I could’ve taken a bus by myself, of course, but she wanted to appear the doting mother. And she was, in her own way. Monitoring the sessions became less important as the therapy dragged on for the months the court demanded. Cy had probably recommended such vigilance. He needn’t have. Mother always took a healthy interest in protecting herself. It was Dr. B. who was most disturbed by the length of the sentence. It g
rew progressively harder to think of things to say to each other.

  I didn’t mention my mother unless prodded, and only then when it felt like not discussing her was going to get us into trouble. I always thought of it as “us.” It was “we” who were in a fix. “We” who had to improvise a solution. There’d hardly been a moment of my life when Mother was not at its center. I assumed it was similar for all children: a child’s life was not truly her own, nor should she want it to be.

  My father was fair game for discussion though and guilty of all the clichés you could list about a former military man: rigid yet indulgent, smart but only in a narrow sense, demanding of perfection, yet pleased when he had to rescue us—before the divorce, at least. I needed to hand someone over to my therapist, and Daddy was the prime candidate. I focused unfairly on Daddy as the “problem” and fired away.

  “Daddy doesn’t visit me.” Or, “Daddy never invites me to stay at his house.” Or, “When I showed Daddy my report card, he said I needed to work harder if I wanted the Ivy League.” This was all true.

  Dr. Bailey raised his eyebrows, and I moved on.

  No one else, including my grandparents, much entered into our chats. If this sounds disloyal, remember Daddy saw me less than once a month over the next five years; Mother and I often slept in the same bed. It was not unusual to wake and find my arms wrapped around her in a near stranglehold. My nocturnal grip never woke her.

  By the end of my therapy, Dr. Bailey must have known the story I’d told the police, a social worker, a judge—wasn’t true. I got vaguer on details, more confused over events since the initial neon clarity had faded. Mother and I hadn’t practiced it often enough. She’d avoided a return to that night, perhaps having forgotten her exact lies.

  And Dr. Bailey was probably too weary of Mother’s presence in his outer sanctum to relive that night. Frightened of the swarm of female hormones rushing across the waiting room toward him each time he opened the door, scared of the spidery arms waving a cigarette around the room despite the “No Smoking” sign, scared too of the deep throaty laugh often erupting at his expense, scared to death of a woman who’d murdered a soda salesman with no known bad habits and let her daughter take the rap. Well, I was too.