I opened the door.
She had a cup of tea, refused to call the police, washed her face, apologized, and finally, after an hour, went home in a cab. I was left with the teacup, the blackened tissues, and an unbearable sense that the rapist had watched her enter and was now lying in wait for me. Each time I thought of the woman, I had a heavy, deep feeling in my chest that I finally recognized as rage—not at her pursuer, but at her.
I hadn’t thought of that night in some ten years until lately, when I have wondered again about the responsibilities of one human being toward others of the species. There are two women that have made me consider this: Cheryl Pierson and Hedda Nussbaum. Both of their cases have made me think of another, too—that of Kitty Genovese.
Miss Pierson went to jail, after she paid a high school classmate to kill her father because, she said, her father would not keep his hands off her, because he sometimes had sexual intercourse with her two and three times a day. Miss Nussbaum went to jail, too, accused with her lover of beating their six-year-old adopted daughter to death. In photographs taken at the time of her arraignment, she looks stunned, but perhaps that is simply a function of her face, the face of an aging prizefighter who has gone back for the TKO many times too many. Clearly, it was not only the little girl who was beaten.
Two horrible secrets. But, of course, people knew. They always do. When Miss Pierson first alleged that her father had molested her, she said that she had been afraid to tell anyone. And then one friend, neighbor, relative after another appeared in court to say that they suspected, that they had watched the man grab his daughter’s body, make dirty comments about it. But nothing was really done until a boy Cheryl Pierson sat next to in homeroom shot Mr. Pierson in the driveway of the Pierson house.
The horror show in Miss Nussbaum’s apartment was an open secret, too. Neighbors heard screams and shouts and the unmistakable sound of something hitting a human being, hard, even through the thick walls of an old building. Some of them saw bruises on the little girl. The difference between this and the Pierson case was that some of them did something. Some of them sought help from police and social service agencies for the people on the other side of the wall. But nothing really was done until the morning when Hedda Nussbaum and Joel Steinberg were taken into custody, their adopted son taken to a foster home, and their little girl taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced brain dead.
And so to Kitty Genovese, twenty-three years dead. She was a national symbol. She was knifed to death and her neighbors listened and watched and, the modern parable went, did nothing. At the time there were two reactions to the story: that it could not have happened, and that, if it did, it could only have happened in New York City.
But it doesn’t only happen in New York, and it happens all the time. We have a national character that helps it along. The rugged individualists who take care of themselves, the independent men and women who prize the freedom to manage their lives without outside interference: these are the essential Americans. We want a police force that respects the rights of individuals, the same police force that will not take a man into custody, even if his wife’s face looks like chopped meat, if she insists she fell in the bathroom.
But the dark side to independence is isolation, and the dark side to managing your own life a belief that it must be perfectly managed. “Dirty laundry,” we call our problems, and “Don’t trouble trouble,” we say. There are countries in which the answer to “How are you?” is often “Not so good.” Here the answer is almost always “Fine.” There are cultures in which family members get together and tell you what you are doing wrong and how to live your life. I prefer one in which everyone minds their own business—at least until that moment when I am yelling “Help!”
So sometimes the victims feel that it is impossible or unseemly to pass their problems on to another, that in the midst of self-reliance they would be blamed for having pain, or sharing it. Sometimes the bystanders feel that if there was real trouble, the victims would do something about it, that the Cheryl Piersons and the Hedda Nussbaums would call hot lines and find therapists, that when the authorities have been notified there is not much more they can be expected to do. In retrospect, of course, it is never enough. The storm breaks, the man is murdered, the child beaten to death, and people realize that, in some sense, they have been watching it all through their curtains. Life as spectator sport.
That’s why I was so angry that night, when one of the players demanded with her streaked cheeks and her sobs that I come down out of the bleachers and help her out. I was taking care of my own life and I had no interest in being implicated in anyone else’s. How dare a stranger pass on her vulnerability. There was nothing I could do anyway. There was no way I could help. But at least I opened the door. If I had known then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have. I would have gone upstairs and called the police, which seems a sensible, no-risk solution. Except that when I came back down she might not have been there. Perhaps she would have been somewhere with a knife at her throat. On the other hand, I would have made the right decision—for me. And I could always say I tried.
SEX ED
Several years ago I spent the day at a family planning clinic in one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods. I sat around a Formica table with a half-dozen sixteen-year-old girls and listened with some amazement as they showed off their knowledge of human sexuality.
They knew how long sperm lived inside the body, how many women out of a hundred using a diaphragm were statistically likely to get pregnant and the medical term for the mouth of the cervix. One girl pointed out all the parts of the female reproductive system on a placard; another recited the stages of the ovulation cycle from day one to twenty-eight. There was just one problem with this performance: although the results of their laboratory tests would not be available for fifteen more minutes, every last one of them was pregnant.
I always think of that day when someone suggests that sex education at school is a big part of the answer to the problem of teenage pregnancy. I happen to be a proponent of such programs; I think human sexuality is a subject for dispassionate study, like civics and ethics and dozens of other topics that have a moral component. I’d like my sons to know as much as possible about how someone gets pregnant, how pregnancy can be avoided, and what it means when avoidance techniques have failed.
I remember adolescence about as vividly as I remember anything, however, and I am not in the least convinced that that information alone will significantly alter the rate of teenage pregnancy. It seemed to me that day in the clinic, and on days I spent at schools and on street corners, that teenage pregnancy has a lot more to do with what it means to be a teenager than with how someone gets pregnant. When I was in high school, at the tail end of the sixties, there was a straightforward line on sex among my friends. Boys could have it; girls couldn’t. A girl who was not a virgin pretended she was. A girl who was sleeping with her boyfriend, no matter how long-playing the relationship, pretended she was not.
It is the nature of adolescence that there is no past and no future, only the present, burning as fierce, bright, and merciless as a bare light bulb. Girls had sex with boys because nothing seemed to matter except right now, not pregnancy, not parental disapprobation, nothing but those minutes, this dance, that face, those words. Most of them knew that pregnancy could result, but they assured themselves that they would be the lucky ones who would not get caught. Naturally, some of them were wrong, and in my experience they did one of three things: they went to Puerto Rico for a mysterious weekend trip; visited an aunt in some faraway state for three months and came back with empty eyes and a vague reputation, or got married, quickly, in Empire-waist dresses.
What seems to have changed most since then is that there is little philosophical counterpoint, hypocritical or not, to the raging hormones of adolescence, and that so many of the once-hidden pregnancies are hidden no more.
Not long after the day at the family planning clinic, I went to a
public high school in the suburbs. In the girl’s room was this graffito: Jennifer Is a Virgin. I asked the kids about it and they said it was shorthand for geek, nerd, weirdo, somebody who was so incredibly out of it that they were in high school and still hadn’t had sex. If you were a virgin, they told me, you just lied about it so that no one would think you were that immature. The girls in the family planning clinic told me much the same thing—that everyone did it, that the boys wanted it, that not doing it made them seem out of it. The only difference, really, was that the girls in the clinic were poor and would have their babies, and the girls in the high school were well-to-do and would have abortions. Pleasure didn’t seem to have very much to do with sex for either group. After she learned she was pregnant, one of the girls at the clinic said, without a trace of irony, that she hoped childbirth didn’t hurt as much as sex had. Birth control was easily disposed of in both cases. The pill, the youngsters said, could give you a stroke; the IUD could make you sterile. A diaphragm was disgusting.
One girl told me the funniest thing her boyfriend—a real original thinker—had told her: they couldn’t use condoms because it was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. She was a smart girl, and pretty, and I wanted to tell her that it sounded as if she was sleeping with a jerk who didn’t deserve her. But that is the kind of basic fact of life that must be taught not in the classroom, not by a stranger, but at home by the family. It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I’ve explained fertile periods and birth control and all the other mechanics that are important to understand but never really go to the heart of the matter: I believe I will say that when you sleep with someone you take off a lot more than your clothes.
EXECUTION
Ted Bundy and I go back a long way, to a time when there was a series of unsolved murders in Washington State known only as the Ted murders. Like a lot of reporters, I’m something of a crime buff. But the Washington Ted murders—and the ones that followed in Utah, Colorado, and finally in Florida, where Ted Bundy was convicted and sentenced to die—fascinated me because I could see myself as one of the victims. I looked at the studio photographs of young women with long hair, pierced ears, easy smiles, and I read the descriptions: polite, friendly, quick to help, eager to please. I thought about being approached by a handsome young man asking for help, and I knew if I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time I would have been a goner. By the time Ted finished up in Florida, law enforcement authorities suspected he had murdered dozens of young women. He and the death penalty seemed made for each other.
The death penalty and I, on the other hand, seem to have nothing in common. But Ted Bundy has made me think about it all over again, now that the outlines of my sixties liberalism have been filled in with a decade as a reporter covering some of the worst back alleys in New York City and three years as a mother who, like most, would lay down her life for her kids. Simply put, I am opposed to the death penalty. I would tell that to any judge or lawyer undertaking the voir dire of jury candidates in a state in which the death penalty can be imposed. That is why I would be excused from such a jury. In a rational, completely cerebral way, I think the killing of one human being as punishment for the killing of another makes no sense and is inherently immoral.
But whenever my response to an important subject is rational and completely cerebral, I know there is something wrong with it—and so it is here. I have always been governed by my gut, and my gut says I am hypocritical about the death penalty. That is, I do not in theory think that Ted Bundy, or others like him, should be put to death. But if my daughter had been the one clubbed to death as she slept in a Tallahassee sorority house, and if the bite mark left in her buttocks had been one of the prime pieces of evidence against the young man charged with her murder, I would with the greatest pleasure kill him myself.
The State of Florida will not permit the parents of Bundy’s victims to do that, and, in a way, that is the problem with an emotional response to capital punishment. The only reason for a death penalty is to exact retribution. Is there anyone who really thinks that it is a deterrent, that there are considerable numbers of criminals out there who think twice about committing crimes because of the sentence involved? The ones I have met in my professional duties have either sneered at the justice system, where they can exchange one charge for another with more ease than they could return a shirt to a clothing store, or they have simply believed that it is the other guy who will get caught, get convicted, get the stiffest sentence. Of course, the death penalty would act as a deterrent by eliminating recidivism, but then so would life without parole, albeit at greater taxpayer expense.
I don’t believe deterrence is what most proponents seek from the death penalty anyhow. Our most profound emotional response is to want criminals to suffer as their victims did. When a man is accused of throwing a child from a high-rise terrace, my emotional—some might say hysterical—response is that he should be given an opportunity to see how endless the seconds are from the thirty-first story to the ground. In a civilized society that will never happen. And so what many people want from the death penalty, they will never get.
Death is death, you may say, and you would be right. But anyone who has seen someone die suddenly of a heart attack and someone else slip slowly into the clutches of cancer knows that there are gradations of dying.
I watched a television reenactment one night of an execution by lethal injection. It was well done; it was horrible. The methodical approach, people standing around the gurney waiting, made it more awful. One moment there was a man in a prone position; the next moment that man was gone. On another night I watched a television movie about a little boy named Adam Walsh, who disappeared from a shopping center in Florida. There was a reenactment of Adam’s parents coming to New York, where they appeared on morning talk shows begging for their son’s return, and in their hotel room, where they received a call from the police saying that Adam had just been found: not all of Adam, actually, just his severed head, discovered in the waters of a Florida canal. There is nothing anyone could do that is bad enough for an adult who took a six-year-old boy away from his parents, perhaps tortured, then murdered him and cut off his head. Nothing at all. Lethal injection? The electric chair? Bah.
And so I come back to the position that the death penalty is wrong, not only because it consists of stooping to the level of the killers, but also because it is not what it seems. Just before one of Ted Bundy’s execution dates was postponed pending further appeals, the father of his last known victim, a twelve-year-old girl, said what almost every father in his situation must feel. “I wish they’d bring him back to Lake City,” said Tom Leach of the town where Kimberly Leach lived and died, “and let us all have at him.” But the death penalty does not let us all have at him in the way Mr. Leach seems to mean. What he wants is for something as horrifying as what happened to his child to happen to Ted Bundy. And that is impossible.
MAKING NEWS
For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and-run driver—that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed onto the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it. I am good at what I do, so often the people who read those stories cried, too. When they were done, they turned the page; when I was done, I went on to another person, another story—went from the cop’s wife whose husband had never come home to the impoverished eighty-year-old Holocaust survivor to the family with the missing child. I stepped in and out of their lives as easily as I did into a pair of shoes in the morning, and when I was done I wrote my piece and went home, to the husband who had not been killed, the bank account that was full, the child safe in his high chair. Sometimes I carried within me, for a day or a week or perhaps even longer, the resonances of their pain. But they were left with the pain itself.
It was not always as bad as I’ve made it sound. On occasion I covered people who wanted to be cov
ered and wrote about things that were not arrows to the heart: pothole programs, town meetings, the cost of living, the GNP. But I was good at something called human interest reporting, just at the time that human interest reporting became the vogue, and so I have spent a good deal of time in the homes of vulnerable strangers, setting up a short-term relationship, making them one-shot friends.
While they were lowering their defenses, I was maintaining my objectivity, which made it possible for me, in a kind of shorthand reminiscent of the “if u cn rd ths” ads on the subway, to put down in my notebook observations like “strokes baby’s head and starts to cry” or “removes pictures of parents from drawer and tells how they were killed by SS.”
I am proud of what I do, and I am ashamed of it, too. I am reasonably sensitive and not too ruthless, and so I have sometimes saved people from their own revelations and sometimes helped them by giving them the feeling that they were talking to someone who thought they were unique. I have never really understood why they talked to me. I am in one of the few businesses in which a service is provided, not to the people we deal with directly, but only to the faceless thousands who read about them. Sometimes reporters call our house to talk to my husband, who has tried newsworthy cases, and I do not miss the irony of the fact that I find them more or less a nuisance, depending on whether they call in the middle of dinner and how officious they are about the absolute necessity of their task.
Some people I have interviewed told me they thought they could help others know they were not alone, and I suspect they were right, and some people said they thought publicity might help them, and they were right, too. Occasionally I would write a story about a person in a bad spot and I would get checks for them in the mail, and I’d pass them along and think, “Well, that’s good.” But that wasn’t why I did the stories. I did them for me.