by Liza Rodman
In the morning, my plate was where I’d left it. The ketchup had congealed into something resembling a red Frisbee—hard and almost plastic-looking, with the lump of the hot dog and spinach underneath. That was breakfast. She called from the front desk when she saw I was up, “We don’t waste food. Children are starving in Biafra.”
Wherever Biafra was, I wished I could send them my hot dog.
* * *
In all my memories of my mother, I have only one that is tender. It was when she would read The Wind in the Willows to us at night. She would settle in on Louisa’s bed, and I’d lie on mine and watch her chest rise and fall with her breath, her voice husky and soft at the same time. As she got into the story, I would cross over to Louisa’s bed and lie at the foot, slowly inching up to them as far as I dared, hoping she wouldn’t notice. But as soon as I got close, Mom would look over the edge of the book, nudging me with her leg, and say, “Go back in your own bed. There’s not enough room for you over here.” I’d scramble back and pull the covers up to my neck, waiting for her to continue. When she finished a chapter, she’d snap the book shut, get up, turn out the light, and tiptoe out of the room, closing the door with a soft click.
I cherished that moment like an old photograph and would pull it out when she was particularly angry at me, which felt like just about all the time. Most of the attention she paid me was with the back of her hand. By far the worst punishments came when she suspected me of lying.
She told me Dad had spent some time in a VA hospital where he was diagnosed as a pathological liar. True or not, it allowed Mom to forever dismiss him as a bad man and father. It also seemed to make her watch for telltale signs of the same pathology in me. I wouldn’t know it then, but I think she could have been more afraid than angry.
“You’re just like your father,” she would say as she slapped me, sometimes hard enough to leave a mark. “A stinking liar.”
I wondered why she wasn’t worried about Louisa being a “stinking liar” as well. Just me.
33 TONY
On the twenty-fourth of September, 1968, Provincetown patrolman James Cook pulled up behind Tony on Commercial Street and told him there was once again a warrant out for his arrest for nonsupport of Avis and the children. He was handcuffed and arrested on the spot, taken in the police cruiser to the Barnstable County House of Correction, known locally as simply the Barnstable County Jail, locked up, and sentenced to serve six months; his arraignment was scheduled for March 18, 1969.
While in jail, Tony had a lot of time to think, and he spent most of it worried—not that people would ask what had happened to Susan Perry but that he might lose Christine Gallant during his long incarceration. In the letters he wrote from jail, he berated the one person he felt was responsible: Avis. After all, she ratted me out about the child support and landed me in jail, hadn’t she?
Actually, she hadn’t. And when she wrote back, she told him so. According to the law, Tony was to have paid his $40 a week for child support to the Provincetown Division of Child Guardianship (today’s Department of Children and Families), which in turn would have doled it out to Avis. But Tony never paid the money, and the department, ever watchful for cheats and scofflaws, put out the warrant for his arrest. To Tony, it was just another instance of his not being able to catch a break.
Wild with anxiety and missing his easy access to the bucket of drugs he’d been taking for nearly three years, Tony wrote Avis ugly and angry letters, in which he again insulted her judgment and her looks.
She replied, “I think you have often assured me my exterior will never be beautiful. I accepted that long ago.”1
Tony once told Paula Hoernig, a friend of Susan Perry’s and one of his teenage followers, “One must never compliment a woman because it goes straight to their head.”2
He also wrote Avis letters in which he detailed her alleged drug use, hoping the jail censors would read it and arrest her for child abuse and neglect. He didn’t stop there. In an eerie innuendo, he threatened to cut her up “into little pieces.” For what supposed transgression, he didn’t say. With that, Avis had had enough and responded with a threat of her own regarding his drug use and dealing: “There is much too much evidence and too many witnesses and people against you already.… If you persist in hassling me I may have to revert to something that turns my stomach to even conceive of. It gets pretty cold in federal prison, I hear. Sorry, but that’s where it’s at.”3
When he wasn’t harassing Avis, he obsessed over his drug caches in the Truro woods and the Provincetown dump. And he had every reason to worry; never one to keep his cards close to his vest, he had bragged to his less-than-savory followers about the amount and variety of drugs in both places. They helped themselves, selling what they didn’t use. There was actually a measure of honor among these thieves, who put aside some of their “earnings” and gave the money to Tony when he was released from jail.
During the drug bust of Jay Von Utter, Tony had developed a friendship of sorts with Sergeant Jimmy Meads. Now sitting behind bars, Tony asked Meads to plead his case for an early release. Meads complied and went one step further, personally guaranteeing that Tony would show up for his trial. The court agreed to let him out, and Tony was released on November 8, nearly four and a half months ahead of schedule, and apparently without paying any bail, all thanks to Jimmy Meads.
Once out of jail, Tony went straight to Avis and asked her and her boyfriend, Jon Doeringer, to drive him to the bus station in Hyannis, where he bought a ticket and headed to New York to visit Christine. They spent that weekend and the weekend after that getting high on a bagful of pills Tony had brought from the remaining supply in his two caches. Whether those weekends were heavenly or hellish, after them Christine wrote her friend Martha Henrique in Provincetown that she was going to marry Raul Matta, her problematic lover, now that he had finally agreed to get a divorce.
Martha was confused; Tony had been telling people all over town that he and Christine were going to get married. But now, Christine was writing that Tony “freaked her out” because of his intensity. Further, and according to one of Christine’s friends from Provincetown as well as phone records obtained later, she called Raul in Florida three times on Friday, November 22, and told him she thought Tony Costa was going to kill her.4 Perhaps she used the phrase colloquially, as in, “When he hears that we are engaged he’s going to kill me!” But perhaps she also used it literally, as in, “I am afraid for my life.” Whatever her tone, Raul was concerned enough that he immediately left Florida, where he had found work during the Cape’s off-season, and headed to New York City. But Tony got there first, arriving around noon the following day, Saturday, November 23. When he got to Christine’s apartment, she told him she was finally getting married to Raul.
It’s not known how Tony took the news, but given that he described her as “everything I was looking for in a woman. She was me. She was myself,”5 probably not well. What is known is that they took some of the drugs Tony always brought with him, but this time, instead of the 30 milligram Nembutal pills Christine normally took, Tony gave her pills over three times as strong—100 milligram. Then in the early afternoon, Tony left her apartment alone and went to visit her friend Primotivo Africa, an artist in the Village, to score some marijuana. When Primo asked where Christine was, Tony replied, “She’s sick,” but offered no more information. Tony stayed for an hour at Africa’s and then went straight to the Port Authority station and took a bus back to Cape Cod. When he got to the Hyannis terminal, he once again called Avis and asked her and Doeringer to come and drive him back to Provincetown. When they dropped him off, Tony told Avis that if she was asked, she was to tell people he came back from New York a week earlier than he actually had. She didn’t ask why.6
When Christine’s roommate, Cynthia Savidge, returned to the apartment Sunday night, she found Christine’s naked body kneeling facedown in a half-filled bathtub, a bruise on her shoulder and three cigarette burns on her chest. Police det
ermined she’d been dead approximately thirty-six to forty-eight hours; the cause was recorded as “asphyxiation due to drowning.”
The New York City associate medical examiner, Dr. Michael Baden, officially ruled Christine’s death a “possible suicide” because he found a “large amount of barbiturates in stomach and brain.”7 When questioned later about the case, he said he couldn’t remember having made a determination about the bruise or the cigarette burns and what role they may have played in connection with her death. But he added that in 1968 it was common practice to put someone in a tub of cold water to shock them out of a potential overdose of barbiturates.8
Back in Provincetown, Tony told anyone who would listen that Christine was suicidal and that she had made repeated threats because “she couldn’t live without me.” Avis echoed his suicide story, claiming that during the weekend before Christine’s death, when she was visiting Tony in Provincetown, Christine had had a bad acid trip and told Avis that she needed to “shed the flesh.”9 Tony also claimed that he received a postcard mailed just hours before her death in which she apologized for killing herself; but he never produced the note to investigators. Tony also hypothesized that Christine could have been a victim of violence, presumably at Raul’s hand. “She knew my life and she had been threatened because of it,” he said,10 although he never explained what that meant or why she would be threatened because of his actions.
* * *
According to homicide detectives, kneeling facedown in the tub would have been an unusual choice for suicide for the simple reason that it’s physically awkward and uncomfortable; most who die from true suicides by overdose take a lethal amount of sleeping pills, lie flat in a warm tub filled to just below the jawline, and once they’ve passed out, they slowly sink under the water.
Rather, when all things are considered in Christine’s case—her relationship with Tony, her growing concern about Tony’s intensifying behavior, her reported impending marriage to Raul, and Tony’s abrupt departure from New York the same day he had arrived—the more likely scenario is that whether accidentally or intentionally, Tony gave her three times the normal dosage of Nembutal and she passed out. Then, perhaps as Baden explained, Tony put her into a half-filled tub of cold water to revive her. When it didn’t work and she died, he left the apartment and fled back to Cape Cod.
In later evaluations, it was suggested by Dr. Harold Williams, one of the many psychiatrists who examined Tony, that by putting her body in water, Tony felt he was cleansing her of her “sins.” Among those sins, in Tony’s thinking, was rejecting his affections in favor of Raul Matta. In addition, those same psychiatrists speculated that he used the cigarette burns to symbolically mutilate Christine, perhaps even brand her as “his.”
Beyond all the speculation, the facts remain: Christine Gallant died sometime Saturday, November 23, from a monstrous dose of Nembutal, naked and kneeling facedown in her tub with fresh cigarette burns and a bruise on her body.
Once again, Tony Costa was the last known person to see a young woman alive.
34 LIZA
As the fall deepened on Cape Cod, Provincetown and the Bayberry Bend emptied of tourists, and Mom found herself bored and alone, if you don’t count Louisa and me. All of her summer friends and beaus had gone back to their homes in the city, and she felt isolated and restless. So she called an old college buddy who lived near Hyannis and asked, “Do you know any single men you could set me up with?”
In fact, her friend did, but with a caveat: “His ex-wife once told me he’s not the kind of guy you’d want to marry.”
Mom didn’t ask why, and she didn’t care. She wanted to go out to dinner with a man who’d compliment her and pick up the check. Within a week, she had a date with Ron Sloan.
She and Ron agreed to meet in a parking lot on Route 6 in Wellfleet after he dropped his two children off with their grandparents, who lived nearby. From there, they drove together in his convertible Thunderbird to the Captain’s Table that overlooked the harbor in Hyannis. It was an old Yankee institution with dark paneling, faded paintings of clipper ships in rough seas, hard wooden chairs, and little pots of port-wine cheese and crackers on the table. Ron ordered a gin gimlet. After a lifetime of drinking rum and Cokes, Mom said she’d have the same. Gin felt like a step up. Stronger. Cleaner. More mature. And most important—classier. When, during dessert that night, Ron reached across the table and held her hand, she was hooked—to him, to the sophisticated gimlets, and to the life he seemed to offer.
Ron watched her across the table thinking she was different from any woman he’d ever met. Until the day he died he told the story of their ride that night back to the parking lot in Wellfleet. It was well after 1:00 a.m. when they arrived at her car. He turned off his engine, and they sat talking. Then, she reached into her pocketbook, pulled out a cigarillo, and lit it. They kissed, lightly and briefly; she thanked him, and got out of the car. He watched her walk to her car, start the engine, and put the top down. As she backed out of the lot, he could hear the song on her radio: “Harper Valley P.T.A.” She waved to him as she pulled onto the highway, the smoke from the little cigar trailing behind, and disappeared down the dark road to Provincetown. He said any woman who would smoke a cigarillo, never mind on a first date, couldn’t be all bad.
Mom moved in her typical fashion—fast. The morning after that first date, she called Grampa Georgie and told him to take our house in West Bridgewater off the market. She was leaving the Cape and moving back to be closer to Ron, who lived in Newton, just west of Boston. She was not going to let her big fish get away. This was her chance to live the way she had always wanted to live and to have the things she had always wanted to have. Life with Ron promised so many of the things she had craved—normality, respect, a fancy house in the suburbs, and perhaps most of all, a really big diamond ring that everyone, everywhere she went, would see.
For one of the first times in her life, Mom was happy, or at least a little less miserable and angry than she always appeared to be.
In mid-November, she drained the Bayberry Bend pipes, shuttered the windows, put the lawn furniture in the storage shed, and closed the motel. Before I knew what hit me, I was taking my seat in Ms. Johnson’s fourth-grade classroom at the Rose L. MacDonald School in West Bridgewater, and Provincetown was once again a memory.
35 TONY
Christine Gallant’s funeral was scheduled for the Friday after Thanksgiving, and again Tony asked Avis and Jon Doeringer for a ride, this time to Fall River so he could attend. It was becoming enough of a routine that Doeringer would later post on Facebook1 a long essay describing the time period titled “Driving Tony Costa.”
Tony claimed he had been asked by Christine’s mother to be a pallbearer, something that galled her friends because they knew he was probably the last person to see her alive and could very well have had something to do with her death. According to one friend, some of Christine’s family members “never got over” his presence at the funeral.2 Tony smoked dope in the back seat all the way to Fall River, and the next day he returned to Provincetown, still stoned and openly distraught.
With nowhere else to go, he crashed on various friends’ couches until he got a room at the White Wind Inn on Commercial Street. In his bathroom, friends saw that he kept a quart-size mason jar jammed with “bennies” and that he was taking as many as ten at a time hoping to drown out whatever convoluted emotions he felt over Christine and her death. He refused to let anyone hug, console, or even touch him, and if they tried, he violently jerked away.
Strung out more than he was sober, he nevertheless made the rounds, applying at the few hotels and motels that would remain open through the winter, trying to find work that would help pay his child support. But he had burned nearly every bridge in town by routinely not showing up for work or by being so stoned when he did that his work was shoddy at best. Nearly all of his old employers wanted nothing to do with him. Then Tony remembered there was new construction starting at the Royal C
oachman. So he hitched out to Beach Point where John Atwood, who was overseeing the work, was desperate for carpenters in order to meet a May deadline. Atwood hired him, even though the job foreman, Roger Nunes, wasn’t so sure.
“That kid is trouble,” he told Atwood. “Mark my words.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Tony continued his downward spiral. Word got back to Avis that Tony might be trying to kill himself with an overdose “like Christine,” and she went to visit him at White Wind. She climbed up the fire escape on the back of the building to Tony’s room carrying an early Christmas gift, a bottle of English Leather, and sat him down, hoping to talk him off the proverbial cliff.
“What have I got to live for?” he said, his voice a squeaky whine.
“Well, you have your children,” she said. “They need you.”
Tony seemed to get better and went to see his kids more regularly as he tried to pull himself out of the depression. But more often than visiting his kids, he drove out to the woods to tap into his drug supply, usually with one or more of his young followers in tow. His entourage ranged in age from fifteen to nineteen, and each helped themselves to drugs from a jar measuring a foot high and five inches across, “filled to the brim” with pills.
A few days before Christmas Tony was driving out to the woods when he decided to get his mother a Christmas tree. He pulled over when he spied the perfect tree. One of his “kid chicks” in the car wondered how in the world he was going to just run up and get the tree. She soon had her question answered; Tony had an ax and a handsaw in his trunk. He always did. He was a carpenter, after all. He never knew when he might need his tools.