by Liza Rodman
I loved Cecelia right away. She was soft and patient and gave the best hugs I’d ever had. And even if her breath sometimes smelled sour, like Grampa Georgie’s, I didn’t mind because in the solid warmth of her arms, I knew that I was loved. Unlike my mother, Cecelia’s eyes would light up when she saw me, and she made me feel that I belonged somewhere. When I was with her, talking for hours in the hotel’s laundry room while she folded sheets and towels warm from the dryer, listening to her hum her church songs, I felt something I rarely did anywhere else. Safe.
7 TONY
Tony always seemed to be looking for work, and when he found it, he did a solid job—electrical, plumbing, carpentry, stonework, painting—he could do just about anything related to constructing or maintaining a building. Even when there wasn’t a major construction job on the Outer Cape, he usually could find an odd job here or there because he was unlicensed and nonunion, and therefore cheaper labor for those hiring. The guys on his work sites said he did a “great job” when he worked, but he was unreliable and prone to impulsive and erratic outbursts that left him withdrawn and sullen if he didn’t get his way. As his friends, including lifelong Provincetown resident Bob Anthony, noted, “Tony always had to be right. About everything.”1 Avis agreed, saying that Tony “considered himself the sole judge on everything”2 and “if he thought he was right and someone disagreed, he would flip.”3 That didn’t go over well with his bosses and foremen, and it often isolated him from his peers, who merely laughed at his childish tantrums.
He had never been one to set goals for himself, and often he could barely muster the energy to get out of bed and read the daily want ads in the Provincetown Advocate. So work remained sporadic. With no regular job to go to, Tony did a lot of walking, usually the dunes where he could be alone, as well as up and down Commercial Street, running into friends and his young hangers-on. A favorite stop along his treks was the counter at Adams Pharmacy, where he would order a cup of tea and a small packet of Lorna Doones, and he would nurse the two while he listened to the older waitresses gossip. One dreary November morning, Tony sat at the counter with a friend who told him about a doctor in Wellfleet he was seeing for his alcoholism. Tony asked if the doc might be able to help him with his crumbling marriage and whatever it was that was gnawing at his stomach. Wellfleet was just far enough from Provincetown that nobody would have to know Tony’s business. A week later, Tony hitchhiked the fifteen miles to Dr. Sidney Callis’s office on Route 6 and walked into the gray clapboard building for the first time.
Dr. Sidney Callis had graduated from Kansas City College of Osteopathy and Surgery, which bestowed a DO (doctor of osteopathic medicine) but not an MD. Then, because of an interest in psychosomatic medicine dealing with emotional illness, Callis did part of his residency at Bridgewater State Hospital, an asylum for the criminally insane, south of Boston. In 1967, Bridgewater would be the subject of a damning documentary, Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman, which exposed brutal and often inhumane treatment of its inmates. After only a few months at Bridgewater, Callis considered himself qualified to act as a marriage counselor. By the time Tony walked into his office, Callis had been practicing medicine and doing counseling in Wellfleet for fifteen years.
Callis asked Tony a few preliminary questions and made note of the young man’s hand-wringing and scratching of his ear, observing that his fingernails were bitten to the quick. Callis told Tony he suffered from a nervous condition, and rather than marriage counseling, he recommended an antianxiety medication. Callis gave him an envelope full of Solacen, each capsule containing 350 milligrams of tybamate, an otherwise safe tranquilizer when used as prescribed but potentially dangerous if abused, particularly when mixed with other drugs.
That evening, Tony took his first pill fifteen minutes before eating, as directed. But by the time Avis put his chocolate pudding dessert in front of him, he told her he couldn’t pick up the spoon.
“Why not?” she said.
“Because it feels like it weighs twenty pounds,” Tony said, and with that he promptly fell asleep, his head falling forward onto the table.
Avis was stunned and shook him awake.
“Jesus, Tony. Look at you,” she said. “What did that quack give you?”
Years later Tony would describe his first experience with Solacen, saying it was like an “unholy orgasm” and that he “hadn’t felt that good in a long time.”4
Eventually, it would be revealed that Callis was being paid by the drug’s maker, Wallace Pharmaceuticals, to write a study5 on Solacen and its effects on patients, a practice that today could cost a doctor his or her license. Tony was not told he was part of a paid study, but he probably wouldn’t have cared. In addition to writing Tony prescriptions, Callis gave him envelopes of free samples from a closet full of pharmaceuticals in his office.
On two occasions, and at Tony’s urging, Avis went with him to see Dr. Callis for her “nervous condition.” But the second and last visit didn’t go well after Callis ridiculed her for not stepping up to her duties as a wife and mother. She tried to talk to him about her night terrors of the visiting visage, but Callis mocked her with a dismissive “Oh, come on!” He wrote her a prescription she didn’t want for yet another Wallace Pharmaceuticals sedative, meprobamate, and quickly ended the visit. Avis refused to go back.
But Tony did go back, a total of nearly thirty visits over the next two and a half years, during which Callis prescribed more than twelve hundred pills.
One day in late 1965, Tony came home to find the apartment a mess and the two babies lying naked on the floor. By his own admission, Tony “went berserk.” He dragged Avis into the bathroom screaming at her: “You’re a slob, a born slob! A grubby little girl!” When he saw that she had put soiled diapers and dirty laundry into the bathtub, his anger turned to fury. He told Avis he was going to give her “a scrubbing you’ll never forget; you first, and then those dirty diapers.”6 He threw her in the shower, turned the hot water on high, doused her with shampoo, and scrubbed her nearly raw with the back brush. It was an indignity that remained with Avis a long, long time.
His marriage in shambles, his work schedule sporadic at best, and now taking Solacen by the handful, Tony spent less and less time at home and more and more time walking the streets and sand dunes of Provincetown. What he really wanted was to get the hell out of Provincetown, and in late May 1966, he found the perfect excuse.
8 LIZA
When I was six, a couple of years after my parents had divorced, Dad—the stinking liar—showed up for the first time since he’d left. His car rolled into the driveway, and I ran to the front door. When he saw me standing there, he gave me a big, wide smile. I couldn’t believe that he had finally come to rescue me from Mom.
Before I could open the door, she pushed past me out of the house and rushed across the lawn to where Dad’s Pontiac sat idling.
She seemed to know he was coming, because she was already pissed as hell.
I cringed as I watched her approach the car. Please don’t make Dad disappear again.
“Where’s my money, Roddy?” she hissed at him, inches from his face. I heard from Grampa Georgie that my dad was lousy with money, and it must have been true; Mom always wanted it, and Dad never had it to give. He forever seemed to owe somebody something with nothing left over to give her, or us.
“I’ll get you the money, Betty,” he said, giving me a wink and a nod of his head toward the passenger seat. I ran down the steps and hopped in the car.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.” She stood with her arms tightly crossed in front of her. “Make sure to have her back by six,” she hollered as Dad backed the car onto Crescent Street. “In case you’ve forgotten, it’s a school night. Don’t be late.”
So he’s not rescuing me forever, I realized, just for the day. Well, I’ll take what I can get.
At first, I was glad Louisa didn’t come, but I wished she had when I saw that my date with Dad wasn’t going to be spent on amusement
park rides or eating cotton candy at the fair. Instead, he pulled into the driveway of his father’s funeral home in Bridgewater, the same place Mom had fallen in love with Dad when she saw him play “Pennies from Heaven” on the piano.
“Let’s go in and say hello to your grandmother.”
“Gramma Dozie.” It was short for “bulldozer,” and she had earned the name. She was cross and crabby and always said what was on her mind, little of it nice. She was too tall and too skinny, with deep-set eyes that were always ringed with black circles, like she’d been punched. Dad insisted Dozie was a snappy dresser, but the few times I saw her, she was always in a housecoat, a cigarette in one hand, the other hand on her hip. I was terrified of her, and she wasn’t crazy about me either. She was mad that Mom had divorced Dad and once told my aunt Judy, “I want nothing to do with Betty or those kids,” and she meant it.
Dad looked over at me.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
I felt both of my index fingers go for my head, and I began twirling my hair. Sometimes it was the only thing that helped settle my nerves, and few things made me as nervous as Gramma Dozie (except, of course, Mom).
“Stop that twirling,” Dad said. “Nothing’s going to hurt you in there.”
I wasn’t so sure. Dozie and Grampa Chapmann lived in the funeral home, in the same house where dead people were stored in the morgue next door until their funerals. Then when it was time, the caskets were wheeled through the kitchen, sometimes during our Sunday breakfast, to the living room for viewing the next day. So I wasn’t at all sure there wasn’t something that could hurt me in there. Besides, even without the dead people being wheeled through, there was Gramma Dozie, standing on the porch with a cigarette and looking at Dad through the smoke. But when she saw me get out of the car, she threw the cigarette into the azalea bushes, turned, and disappeared into the house. The screen door slammed behind her.
I followed Dad past the big water fountain on the lawn and up the walkway, dragging my flip-flops along the uneven bricks. Grampa Chapmann met us on the porch, wiping his hands on an apron. He reached out and shook Dad’s hand and then gave my head a pat-pat. I shrunk a little and couldn’t help but wonder where that hand had been that it needed wiping.
Dad and Grampa talked as they walked into the front room. The curtains were closed, and a couple of dim lamps were lit in the corners. I stopped in the doorway and then took a step back.
At the far side of the room stood a casket, and it was open. I could just see the tip of a large white nose.
“Who do you have today?” Dad asked, walking over to the casket and looking in.
“Joe Rose,” Grampa said. “Remember him? He ran the deli on Main Street.”
“Sure,” Dad said, leaning in to get a better look. “You did a good job, Dad. Good color. Not too much filler in the cheeks. But”—he plucked something from Joe’s lip—“you left some suture on the poor guy.”
Grampa chuckled. “Comes with the territory, I’m afraid,” he said, taking the little piece of string from Dad and tucking it into his apron pocket.
Yuck.
“Come on, Liza. Don’t be scared,” Dad said, and walked back to where I stood. He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me forward. “Come closer.”
I was quite sure I was close enough. It was hard to take a deep breath because the air stunk from all the flowers draped over the casket and in huge vases on the side tables and floor. I was beginning to get queasy, and for a terrible moment I thought I might throw up on the fancy carpet. I wanted nothing more than to run out of that room, out the front door, and down the street as fast as my legs would carry me. Instead, Dad took my hand and pulled me over to the casket.
“That’s better,” he said.
I peered over the edge of the casket at Joe Rose. He lay there, white and waxy, one hand resting on the other on his suit coat, his mouth set in a grim line. I swore I saw his chest move. And even though Grampa said he was dead, and I knew that he’d never talk or breathe or smile again, I was suddenly filled with terror that he would, that Joe Rose would rise up and look right at me and bare his yellow crooked teeth.
“Go ahead, touch him,” Dad said.
Touch him? I thought. Really?
“Touch him,” Dad said again, pushing at my elbow. “I don’t want you afraid of a cadaver. It’s the family business.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, reached out, and with the tip of my finger gave Joe Rose a quick poke in his hard chest. It felt like poking a bag of flour. Then, before Dad could grab a hold of me, I turned and ran out of the room, through the front door, and out to the fountain. Leaning over the edge, I dunked my face into the cold water, hoping the shock of it would erase the image of poor, dead Joe Rose’s face.
Later that night, I heard Mom downstairs on the phone with Auntie.
“That lying sonofabitch! Roddy doesn’t pay a dime of child support, and after two years he has the nerve to just show up, looking to take his precious little girl out for the afternoon? I only let her go because I wanted my money. But he didn’t give me so much as one damn dollar. He’s such a goddamn bastard!”
She just yelled and yelled into the phone about how she was going to have him arrested. I hoped she wasn’t serious, but she sure talked an awful goddamn lot about how “just plain wrong” it was that he didn’t support his children.
But Dad got one thing right: Joe Rose would be the first and only corpse that scared me in the years to come. After that, a dead body was just another “customer” in the family funeral home.
9 TONY
Toward the end of May 1966, Tony finally found his excuse to leave town—leave Avis and the kids, leave their miserable apartment, and leave all his other problems behind. He met two girls, Bonnie Williams and Diane Federoff, who wanted a ride out to California, and he offered to take them, as if it were down to Hyannis rather than thirty-two hundred miles across the country.
They got as far as eastern Arizona before his beat-up 1959 Bonneville overheated. He’d driven more than twenty-six hundred miles since leaving Provincetown, and he’d done it with only a few quick stops, fueled by handfuls of various amphetamines he kept stashed in a coffee can under the front seat. After months of swallowing Solacen like aspirin, he’d started taking amphetamines to help bring him back “up.” He’d finally stopped to rest when he was punch-drunk with exhaustion and feared running off the road. He pulled up at the Bonanza Motel outside Amarillo for a couple hours of sleep and a shower. If it hadn’t been for the girls, he was sure he’d have already made it to San Francisco.
But the two of them were always demanding he pull over—to eat, to pee, or to stretch their legs. It was always something. Bonnie was worse than Diane; maybe she irked him more because she was plump, and for Tony it was just one more personal weakness. He had always kept himself trim, within five pounds of his ideal weight for his six feet—175 pounds. But more than Bonnie’s weight, what most likely chafed him was that she was a true redhead—forthright, even fearless, in ways he knew he would never be; she demanded they stop even though he didn’t want to and complained loudly at his car’s lack of air-conditioning. “She had a real mouth on her,” her sister later said.1 Diane was the quieter of the two. She was also frail, almost fragile, and stunningly pretty with bright blue eyes, porcelain skin, and long blond hair. She was at once vulnerable and untouchable. Even though she was only sixteen, she reminded Tony of Peggy Lipton, a beautiful actress he’d seen on television. But still, both girls were annoying as hell, and he wished again, as he had a hundred times since leaving Cape Cod, that he’d never offered to give them a ride. But with the two babies and a very unhappy wife back in Provincetown, anything seemed better than listening to the incessant noise in his and Avis’s claustrophobic apartment. So there he was—stranded on a remote section of highway with a dead car and two bothersome teenagers.
He’d met the girls at the Fo’csle tavern in Provincetown the week before. Shortened from “forecas
tle,” the place on a ship where sailors sleep and spend their off-duty hours, the Fo’csle was dark and dank, with fish netting, lobster traps, and faded buoys hanging from the ceiling and half a dory sticking out of the far wall. The place reeked of stale cigarettes and urine, and its floor was warped by years of spilled beer and worse. But unlike the bars for tourists and summer people, with overpriced crab cakes and shrimp cocktails and a view of the ocean from their decks, the Fo’csle was a dive where short beers were fifteen cents and “schooners” were twenty-five. And it was one of the few places open year-round. Summer people wouldn’t be caught dead in its dingy recesses. One observer at the time described its patrons as “an unapologetically wild bunch, a veritable Manson family minus the homicides. Swimming on acid and pumped up on speed, [they] shoplifted and stole bicycles. Some fucked everyone in town, sold drugs, failed invariably at menial jobs, and skipped out on the rent.”2 The description could have been written with Tony Costa in mind.
When Tony met the girls at the bar, they were broke, hungry, and badly needed a place to crash and a hot bath. They had run away from their homes in Florida and had been on the road for weeks, following the rides where they took them, ending up in Provincetown in late May. Tony later said they were groupies of various cover bands and found themselves at the Fo’csle after following one of the musicians to Cape Cod. Because Tony fancied himself a friend to the downtrodden, he suggested they could sleep on his couch until they figured out what they were going to do next. They jumped at the offer. When he appeared at home with his two grungy houseguests, Avis welcomed them, but after a week of the girls eating “everything but the mouse seed,” Avis demanded Tony get “rid of them.” The girls had been helpful enough looking after the babies, but she and Tony could barely afford to feed themselves and the boys, let alone the two strays from God only knew where.