The Trapdoor

  “The gentleman standing at the back,” he said, “is John Wells, a reporter for the New York City Star. Mr. Wells is here to do a series of stories on the tragedies that have come to us. Whether or not you cooperate with him is, of course, up to each of you. For myself, I think the more the public learns about this terrible problem, the better.”

  The students turned in their seats and looked at me. They studied me for several moments. They didn’t look particularly happy I was there.

  All in all, I couldn’t blame them.

  5 I was looking at the snapshot of a girl. She was fifteen, small and slender. She had dark skin. Big, serious brown eyes. A pleasant face, but not all that pretty. She had straight hair, dark brown. The kind of hair teenaged girls always wish was fluffy and blond. It hung down long in back.

  “She used to chew on it when she was thinking,” her mother said.

  Her mother’s hair had been dark brown, too, but there was a lot of gray in it now. She was a trim, elegant woman. She was wearing a one-piece navy-blue dress, and a single strand of pearls. She held the strand in the fingers of one hand, and with the other reached out to take the snapshot back from me.

  Her name was Carla Scofield. The girl in the photograph was her daughter, Nancy. Nancy was dead.

  We were sitting in the screened-in porch of the Scofield’s colonial home, about a mile from the center of town. The house was at the top of an incline, with the porch overlooking the driveway below. Mrs. Scofield sat on the sofa with the snapshots and mementos fanned out before her on the coffee table. She searched among them with one hand. With the other she fingered the pearls.

  She handed me another photo. Nancy playing the clarinet.

  “She played in the school band when she was younger. You know, not that badly. Not that well. She practiced, though. I never had to remind her.”

  She did look very serious about it in the picture. Her lips frowning over the reed, her brow wrinkled in concentration. Her fingers seemed heavy and deliberate on the stops.

  Mrs. Scofield smiled. She smiled a lot. The skin of her high cheekbones pulled taut on her face when she smiled. Her eyes glistened. I looked in her eyes. Then I stopped looking.

  Her husband Larry sat beside her on the arm of the sofa. Like her, he was in his early forties. A thin man of medium size with a round, friendly face like his daughter’s, topped with a thin halo of reddish hair. He’d taken a half day off from work to talk to me. He worked as a sales executive at IBM. Mrs. Scofield was a full-time mother. She had a ten-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl to care for.

  “Was it six weeks ago already?” Mrs. Scofield said. She looked up at her husband. Her bright smile flashed. He nodded. He couldn’t look in her eyes either. “It doesn’t seem that way. It doesn’t seem that way at all. Maybe I’m just not … used to the idea.”

  “Of course you’re not,” said Mr. Scofield. He patted her shoulder. She showed him part of her smile. “We’ve joined a group,” he told me. “Down in White Plains. A group of parents who’ve … lost children this way. It’s very … helpful to talk to other people who’ve been through the same thing.”

  I nodded. His expression cried out to me: It’s not. It’s not helpful at all. Nothing helps. Ever.

  “You have to understand,” said Mrs. Scofield, and now there was a tone of urgency in her voice. “It happened on an ordinary day. It seems like … if you could just erase that one hour from that one day, then everything would be … back to normal again.”

  “It was the last week of September?” I said.

  “Yes. That’s right. A Wednesday. Just a week after school began. It was about five-thirty when I came home from the supermarket with Betsy. Brad was in the basement, playing with his trains. Nancy was upstairs. She was …” And for the first time, her smile faltered. There was a hitch in her voice. Her husband leaned toward her as if to catch her. But she went on: “She was still alive then.”

  “She couldn’t have known,” he explained to me.

  “Well, you see, she’d been happier. All summer. Nancy was always a quiet, an introspective girl. She didn’t have very many friends. She wasn’t dating yet. She always worried about that. She thought she was ugly. She always said her hair …” As she spoke, she reached out and touched one of the photos of her daughter on the table. She touched her daughter’s hair, as if to set it right. “I told her and told her: her hair was just fine.” She glanced up quickly. “But she’d been quite happy all summer. She’d had a job … at McDonald’s. She’d been … looking better. Taking better care of the way she dressed and made up and all. I really couldn’t have known … I really didn’t ….”

  “Of course you couldn’t,” said her husband.

  Her hand fluttered up in the air like a bird flushed from a hedge. She had meant a quieter gesture, but it got away from her.

  “I was down there in the kitchen making dinner all that time. All that time … when she was dying,” she said. “Even when it was dinnertime, I called to her. She said … she said, ‘I’m writing something, Mother.’ She said, ‘I’ll eat later.’ She called it out from behind the door. I thought it was a school assignment. I didn’t want to disturb her.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You know, my husband and I, we didn’t even know she wrote … poetry and short stories. We didn’t even know until we found them all.”

  “I’d like to see some of them,” I said.

  Mrs. Scofield, fingering her pearls, reached into the papers and snapshots spread out before her. She found a piece of looseleaf notepaper and lifted it out from the rest.

  “This was what she was writing,” she said softly. “When I called in to her. This is what we found when we finally broke down the door. It wasn’t until much later that we did it. Bedtime almost. We were all … busy. Busy, I … I don’t know.”

  “I was watching TV,” said Mr. Scofield, as if he were amazed by it. “I was watching an old western on TV. Richard Widmark was in it.”

  “And I was washing up, and getting the kids ready for bed and … It was an ordinary day. Can you understand that? It was an ordinary day.” The skin over her cheeks stretched tight with her brittle smile. I told her I could understand. “Even when we finally went up there … even when we started knocking, we thought she was asleep. You see? We knocked for ten minutes before we did it, before we finally broke down the door. This is what we found when we went in. She was lying on the bed with her hands folded on her chest. This was in her hands.”

  I took the paper. The writing on it had been done with a ballpoint pen. It was precise and girlish-clean, with carefully sculpted letters, small and round. It was a poem.

  It would make a good ending for the first article in the series:

  A VALENTINE

  by

  Nancy Scofield

  Do you consider that I have not seen,

  day after day, your moving away from me?

  Woven, intrinsic, in the things we’ve been—

  loving and loved—the good-bye must also be.

  Life doesn’t have a life apart from dying.

  No day begins that does not see its night.

  No lover knows a love apart from crying.

  My tears are darkness. Our love was the light.

  And now sunset’s coming. And now, the sun’s set.

  My love has died with it, but not my regret.

  Life, too, must be over, before I forget.

  I glanced up, about to speak. I didn’t speak. Mrs. Scofield spoke first.

  “You see,” she said, smiling brightly, brightly. “She’d already taken the pills when I first called her. So many pills.” She shook her head, smiling. “So many, many pills.”

  6 So for Nancy Scofield, anyway, life never got any better than high school. But then, I guess it never got any worse either.

  For her it had been a life lived in the shadow of a hallway wall. She clung to that shadow as she passed from class to class. She held close to the lines of locker do
ors as if they rimmed a zone of invisibility through which she could walk unnoticed. Her eyes studied the floor. Her voice, when she was forced into a greeting, was a whisper. In the high school world of cliques and stations, hers was the station of the painfully shy, the clique of the obscure. Like the song says, nobody knew she was there.

  And then, one day, she wasn’t. Life doesn’t have a life apart from dying. That’s the way she wrote it. A queer little poem. I’d have to show it to McKay when I got back to the city. He’d told me once—when we’d had a couple in Flanagan’s place—something Nathaniel Hawthorne said. Something like: You can spend your whole life trying to understand the things you write when you’re young. Nancy’s poem reminded me of that. It was written by a girl who had thought dark thoughts—and then stepped off the edge of things before she’d had time to come to grips with the darkness.

  Lonely as she was, she did have two close friends. Her clique of three. The ones she talked to about guys and life and, as it turned out, death too. Joanne was a fat, unattractive girl. Fifteen. She had pimples on her plump cheeks. She had short mousy hair that dangled limply. Mindy, on the other hand, was small and pert-looking. She’d already developed a good figure. She wore her jeans tight in back and her sweater tight in front to show it off. She had a round face which was not beautiful. But she had nice, big eyes—pale brown—and her slightly buck teeth gave her a cute, squirrelly look.

  I met them in back of the school as the day ended. In front the kids were filing to their yellow buses, or drifting in groups down the tree-lined sidewalks. To the side of the redbrick building the teams were pouring out onto the track. Boys in shorts and sweatshirts. Girls in sweatshirts and culottes. The kids bent and stretched on the lawn surrounding the asphalt track. The voices of coaches drifted to us where we stood.

  It had gotten colder. I was cold, anyway, even though I wore my heavy overcoat and kept my hands shoved in the pockets. I had a cigarette clenched between my teeth. Smoke and vapor came out on my breath together. I walked between Mindy and Joanne into the schoolyard.

  Mostly, it was a broad square of grass, bordered by low slopes and fences. There were little elm and oak trees planted here and there. Only the far end was wide open for use as a playing field. There were soccer nets set up there.

  But there was one corner of the place that was not grass, that had been paved over and fenced in. It was a little picnic area. Two maple trees overhung the tables and benches. The open asphalt had a dodgeball court painted on it. There was a tetherball pole to one side. The little area was empty now. The yellow leaves of the maples were falling into it. They blew across the pavement in the chill wind.

  We stood in a row of three, looking through the fence.

  “She used to always be out here,” Mindy told me. It was clear she had been the leader of the group. “She used to always be out here reading.” Her voice was hard. She was chewing gum. Her big brown eyes stared impassively.

  Joanne nodded. “Yeah,” she said. She was chewing gum as well.

  “She used to read all this morbid stuff,” Joanne continued. “Poetry. You know what I mean? Like, always about death.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. You can write that down.” I kept standing there with my hands in my pockets. “No, really, it was. Ask Joanne,” Mindy said.

  “It was,” said Joanne.

  “You know, like Edgar Allen Poe, or Emily Dickinson or somebody. Then she’d write these stories and show them to you.” Mindy shivered. She was wearing a scarf, but she kept her shocking pink flight jacket open to show off the front of her sweater. “Jesus. They were always about some person, you know, breaking up with someone or something, and it always ended … they either took pills or put their heads in the oven or blew their brains out or something.” She glanced at me, a little pleadingly behind all that grit, I thought. “We always thought they were kind of funny,” she said.

  I nodded, bit down on my cigarette. The cigarette smoked and burned in the cold, clear air. I pictured Nancy out there for a second. At the picnic table. Her arms folded over the top of a book, her head bent down over it. Long hair dangling. Maybe a strand of it in her mouth.

  “Any of it true?” I asked.

  “Like what?” said Mindy.

  “Yeah, like what?” said Joanne.

  “Did she have a boyfriend or anything? Someone she broke up with.”

  “Nancy?” Mindy shook her head wisely. “You gotta be joking. Only in her dreams. I mean all she could ever talk about was, ‘I’m too flat-chested, my hair’s too limp, I’m ugly, I’m stupid,’ I’m this and that.”

  “She used to get angry at me when I told her it didn’t matter,” said Joanne, almost to herself.

  “Yeah,” said Mindy, “she was always saying, like, ‘I might as well be dead.’ I used to try to tease her out of it, you know. I mean, jokingly … You know what I mean? Not seriously. Just as a joke. I think she used to like it. Really,” she said.

  I finally said, “Sure. I understand.”

  “Yeah,” said Mindy, relieved. “Yeah.” Then she bit her lip and looked down at the ground.

  “But her mother told me she was a little more cheerful this summer.”

  “Yeah,” said Mindy. “Yeah. She was.”

  “So I thought, maybe, you know, she’d met a guy.”

  Mindy considered it. Glanced at me, shook her head.

  “Nah. We’d have known. We would’ve. I mean, if you read her stories and stuff, you’d think she never did anything but have lovers and kill herself.…” Her voice trailed away. She looked down at the ground again.

  “So what was it, you think,” I asked quietly. “What made her happier, before the end?”

  “I … I don’t know, what was I, her shrink or something?” She raised her eyes defiantly for a moment. But only for a moment. “I mean, it was summer,” she said then. “I guess. I guess that was it. I mean, she was out of here, out of this lousy place. Jesus, that would cheer anyone up.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Then what? What turned the screw?”

  Mindy kept looking down, kept shaking her head. “Life,” she said. “That’s all. Just life. It sucks.”

  “Yeah,” said Joanne. “It really does.”

  I plucked the cigarette from my mouth, darted it into the grass at my feet. “Yeah, well, I guess that would do it,” I said.

  The irony was faint, but Mindy heard it. “Well, maybe it was different back when you were a kid,” she said. Her voice was soft now. The corner of her lips were pulled down in a frown. “But for us, okay, it stinks. I mean, everybody says, oh, you know, ‘Why do kids take drugs, why are they so fucked up, why do they get pregnant, why do they kill themselves?’ And the television and everybody interviews the parents and the teachers and the experts and maybe the kids who tow the company line, the good little boys and girls, you know. But lookit: on the one side, we’ve got a bunch of idiot teachers who can’t do anything else and are probably afraid to do anything else or whatever, and their biggest thrill, you know, is telling us what to do, when, if you ask me, any girl who can have a goddamned baby ought to be able to decide when to chew gum or not. And on the other hand, you got a bunch of kids, they care about looking cool and getting laid and getting into college and being on the football team and making money, you know. And I’ll go out with you but not with you, and you can come to my party and you can’t, and you’re not one of us, you know. And then, I mean, the worst thing is, the fucking worst thing of all is: it stays this way. I mean, doesn’t it? Basically, I mean, that’s what life is like. It’s idiots telling you what to do on one side, and everyone fighting to be, like, more popular or rich or something on the other. So why don’t you write that in your story: ‘Nancy Scofield killed herself because we run a fucked-up world and high school is where we teach kids to live in it’?”

  She shook her head violently. Her chestnut hair tossed back and forth. She snapped her gum.

  “I used to tell Nancy,” she
went on fiercely, “I used to tell her: what do you want to be like those girls for, turning their noses up at everybody? I mean, they go out with those idiot guys, all they can talk about is ‘Oh, yeah, man, I’m a jock, aren’t I cool,’ or what record they bought. I mean, that’s what she wanted to be like. I told her—” said Mindy. Then she burst into tears.

  She turned her face away from me. Inside her shocking pink flight jacket her shoulders shook. I could hear the sobs rack her.

  “You fuck,” she managed to say at last. “All of you. All of you fucking people.” She cried and cried, moaning. “Why didn’t somebody help her? That’s what I want to know, all right? All right? I mean, if all you fucking old people are so smart, all right? Why didn’t one of you help her?”

  7 It was Tuesday night. I was in my hotel room on the mountaintop. I was at the writing desk with the mirror on it. My portable electric typewriter was set up in front of me. There was a glassful of scotch to the left of it. There was an ashtray full of smoldering butts to the right.

  I pounded at the keys. The Scofield story was nearly done. Cambridge wasn’t planning to run the first piece in the series until Sunday. Then he’d follow-up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and wrap the thing with a big piece the Sunday following. I could get the piece finished tonight, express it down to the paper tomorrow morning, and never go near the computer terminal in White Plains.

  The sound of the clacking keys was comforting in the lonely room. The scotch made my belly warm. The smoke from my latest cigarette curled and twisted up around my nose. It smelled good. The page rolled up before me. Another ’graph, maybe two, it would be finished.

  The picture window was to my right, the bathroom to my left. The bathroom door was closed now. Someone was in there. I could hear her, even as I typed. She was getting ready. I could hear the legs of the chair scraping against the tiled floor as she dragged it over. But I kept typing.