The Virgin Suicides (23 page)

From that episode, no more indicative of spiritualism than a Ouija board’s turning up amid the usual Milton Bradleys, Ms. Perl based her claim that the suicides were an esoteric ritual of self-sacrifice. Her third story, under the headline “Suicides May Have Been Pact,” outlines the generic conspiracy theory, which held that the girls planned the suicides in concert with an undetermined astrological event. Cecilia had merely entered first, while her sisters waited in the wings. Candles lit the stage. In the orchestra pit, Cruel Crux began to wail. The
Playbill
we held in the audience showed a picture of the Virgin. Ms. Perl choreographed it all nicely. What she could never explain, however, was why the girls chose the date of Cecilia’s suicide
attempt
rather than her actual death some three weeks later on July 9.

But this discrepancy stopped no one. Once the copycat suicides occurred, the media descended on our street without letup. Our three local television stations sent news teams, and even a national correspondent showed up in a motor home. He’d heard about the suicides at a truck stop in the southwestern corner of our state, and had come up to see for himself. “I doubt I’ll shoot anything,” he said. “I’m supposed to be the color guy.” Still, he parked the motor home down the block, and from then on we saw him lounging on its plaid seats, or cooking hamburgers on the miniature stove. Undeterred by the parents’ delicate condition, the local news teams ran stories immediately. It was then we saw the footage of the Lisbon house taken months earlier, a soggy pan of roof and stark front door, leading to a recap where every night the same five faces filed by, Cecilia in her yearbook photo, followed by her sisters in theirs. Live hookups were still new at the time, and often microphones went dead, or lights burned out, leaving reporters speaking in the dark. Spectators not yet bored with television competed to get their heads into the frame. Each day the reporters attempted to interview Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, and each day they failed. By showtime, however, they seemed to have gained access to the girls’ very bedrooms, given all the intimate treasures they brought back. One reporter held up a wedding dress made the same year as Cecilia’s, and except for the unshorn hem, we couldn’t tell them apart. Another reporter ended his broadcast by reading a letter Therese had written to the Brown admissions office—“ironically,” as he put it, “only three days before she put an end to any dreams of college … or of anything else.” Gradually, the reporters began referring to the Lisbon girls by first names, and neglected to interview medical experts in favor of collecting reminiscences. Like us, they became custodians of the girls’ lives, and had they completed the job to our satisfaction, we might never have been forced to wander endlessly down the paths of hypothesis and memory. For less and less did the reporters ask why the girls had killed themselves. Instead, they talked about the girls’ hobbies and academic awards. Wanda Brown, on Channel 7, unearthed a photo of a bikinied Lux at the community swimming pool, allowing a lifeguard to reach down from his chair and apply zinc oxide to her bunnyish nose. Every night the reporters revealed a new anecdote or photo, but their discoveries bore no relation to what we knew to be true, and after a while it began to seem as though they were talking about different people. Channel 4’s Pete Patillo referred to Therese’s “love of horses,” though we’d never seen Therese near a horse, and Tom Thomson, on Channel 2, often mixed up the girls’ names. The reporters cited as fact the most apocryphal accounts, and confused details of stories they got basically right (in this way Cecilia’s black underwear appeared on the wax dummy Pete Patillo passed off as Mary). Knowing the rest of the city accepted the news as gospel only demoralized us further. Outsiders, in our opinion, had no right to refer to Cecilia as “the crazy one,” because they hadn’t earned their shorthand by a long distillation of firsthand knowledge. For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on. Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters’ inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

After the suicide free-for-all, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon gave up the attempt to lead a normal life. Mrs. Lisbon stopped attending church, and when Father Moody went to the house to console her, no one answered the door. “I kept ringing the bell,” he told us. “No dice.” During Mary’s entire stay in the hospital, Mrs. Lisbon appeared only once. Herb Pitzenberger saw her come out onto the back porch with a stack of manuscript pages. Putting them into a pile, she lit them. We never learned what they were.

About this time, Ms. Carmina D’Angelo received a call from Mr. Lisbon, asking her to put the house back on the market (he’d taken it off shortly after Cecilia’s suicide). Ms. D’Angelo tactfully pointed out that the present condition of the house would not facilitate the sale, but Mr. Lisbon responded, “I realize. I’ve got a guy coming in.”

It turned out to be Mr. Hedlie, the English teacher from school. Out of work for the summer, he arrived in his VW bug, its bumper sticker still supporting the last failed Democratic candidate for President. When he got out, he was wearing not his former schoolmaster’s blazer and trousers, but a bright green-and-yellow dashiki and a pair of lizard sandals. His hair covered his ears and he moved with the bohemian slouch of teachers during vacation, resuming unruly lives. Despite his look of a commune leader, he set to work in earnest, carting out over three days a mountain of refuse from the Lisbon house. While Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon went to stay in a motel, Mr. Hedlie took charge of the house, throwing away snow skis, watercolor paints, bags of clothes, a Hula Hoop. He dragged the worn-out brown sofa outside, cutting it in two when it wouldn’t fit through the doorway. He filled trash bags with potholders, old coupons, heaps of accumulated twist-ties, superseded keys. We saw him attacking the overgrowth of each room, hacking away with his dustpan, and on the third day he began wearing a surgical mask because of the dust. He never spoke to us anymore in obscure Greek phrases, or took interest in our sandlot baseball games, but arrived every morning with the hopeless expression of a man draining a swamp with a kitchen sponge. As he lifted rugs and threw out towels, he unleashed the odors of the house in waves, and many people thought he wore the surgical mask to protect himself not from dust but from the exhalations of the Lisbon girls that still lived in bedding and drapes, in peeling wallpaper, in patches of carpet preserved brand-new beneath dressers and nightstands. The first day Mr. Hedlie restricted himself to the first floor, but the second day he ventured into the sacked seraglio of the Lisbon girls’ bedrooms, wading ankle-deep in garments that gave off the music of a past time. Pulling Cecilia’s Nepalese scarf from behind a headboard, he was greeted, at each fringy end, with the tinkling of green corroded bells. Bedsprings sang two-note plaints when stood on end. Pillows snowed dead skin.

He emptied six shelves from the upstairs closet, throwing out stacked bath towels and washcloths, frayed mattress liners bearing rose or lemon-colored stains, blankets sopped with the picnic of the girls’ spilled sleep. On the top shelf he found and pitched household medical supplies—a hot-water bottle the texture of inflamed skin, a midnight-blue jar of Vicks VapoRub fingerprinted inside, a shoe box full of ointments for ringworm and conjunctivitis, salves applied to nether regions, aluminum tubes dented, squeezed, or rolled up like party favors. Also: orange baby aspirin the girls had chewed as candy, an old thermometer (oral, alas) in its black plastic case, along with a variety of other implements pressed, inserted, applied into or onto the girls’ bodies; in short, all the earthly concoctions Mrs. Lisbon had used over the years to keep the girls alive and well.

This was when we found the albums of the Grand Rapids Gospelers, Tyrone Little and the Believers, and the rest. Every evening when Mr. Hedlie left, coated with a white film that aged him thirty years, we went through the mixture of treasure and junk he set out at the curb. The extraordinary latitude Mr. Lisbon had given him surprised us, for Mr. Hedlie disposed of not only replaceable items such as shoe polish tins (gouged to silver centers) but family photographs, a working Water Pik, and a strip of butcher paper marking the growth of each Lisbon daughter at one-year intervals. The last thing Mr. Hedlie threw out was the empty television set, which Jim Crotter took up to his bedroom, only to find inside the stuffed iguana Therese had taught biology with, its tail torn off and the trapdoor in its abdomen missing, exposing various numbered plastic organs. We, of course, took the family photographs and, after organizing a permanent collection in our tree house, divided the rest by choosing straws. Most of the photographs had been taken years before, in what appears to be a happier time of almost endless family cookouts. One photograph shows the girls sitting Indian style, balanced on the lawn’s seesaw (the photographer has tilted the camera) by the counterweight of a smoking hibachi uphill. (We regret to say that this photograph, Exhibit #47, was recently found missing from its envelope.) Another favorite is the series of totem-pole shots, taken at a tourist attraction, with each girl substituting her face for a sacred animal.

But despite all this new evidence of the girls’ lives, and of the sudden drop-off of family togetherness (the photos virtually cease about the time Therese turned twelve), we learned little more about the girls than we knew already. It felt as though the house could keep disgorging debris forever, a tidal wave of unmatched slippers and dresses scarecrowed on hangers, and after sifting through it all we would still know nothing. There came an end to the outflow, however. Three days after Mr. Hedlie forged into the house, he came out, opening the front door for the first time and proceeding down the front steps to place beside the
FOR SALE
sign another, smaller sign that read,
GARAGE SALE
. That day, and for two days following, Mr. Hedlie offered up an inventory that encompassed not only the chipped dishware of a garage sale but the heavy durable goods offered at the liquidation of an estate. Everyone went, not to buy but just to enter the Lisbon house, which had been transformed into a clean spacious area smelling of pine cleaner. Mr. Hedlie had thrown out all the linens, anything that had belonged to the girls, anything broken, leaving only furniture, tables polished with linseed oil, kitchen chairs, mirrors, beds, each item bearing a neat white tag showing the price in his effeminate handwriting. The prices were final; he did not haggle. We roamed the house, upstairs and down, touching beds the girls would never sleep on again or mirrors that would never again hold their images. Our parents didn’t buy used furniture, and certainly didn’t buy furniture tainted with death, but they browsed like the others who came in response to the newspaper ad. A bearded Greek Orthodox priest showed up with a group of rotund widows. After cawing like crows and turning up their noses at everything, the widows furnished the priest’s new rectory bedroom with Mary’s canopy bed, Therese’s walnut dresser, Lux’s Chinese lantern, and Cecilia’s crucifix. Others arrived, carting away the contents of the house bit by bit. Mrs. Krieger found her son Kyle’s retainer on a display table outside the garage, and after failing to persuade Mr. Hedlie that it belonged to her son, bought it back for three dollars. The last thing we saw was a man with a paintbrush mustache loading the sailing ship model into the trunk of his Eldorado.

Though the exterior of the house remained in disrepair, the interior was presentable once again, and within the next few weeks Ms. D’Angelo managed to sell the house to the young couple who live there now, though they can no longer be called young. Back then, however, in the first flush of having money to burn, they made an offer that Mr. Lisbon accepted, despite its being far below what he had paid. The house was almost completely empty at that point, the only thing left being Cecilia’s shrine, a woolly mass of candle drippings fused to the windowsill, which Mr. Hedlie had superstitiously neglected to touch. We thought we might never see Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon again, and even then we began the impossible process of trying to forget about them. Our parents seemed better able to do this, returning to their tennis foursomes and cocktail cruises. They reacted to the final suicides with mild shock, as though they’d been expecting them or something worse, as though they’d seen it all before. Mr. Conley adjusted the tweed necktie he wore even while cutting the grass and said, “Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.” He went on to deliver a living room lecture about human needs and the ravages of competition, and even though he was the only Communist we knew, his ideas differed from everyone else’s only in degree. Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn’t even had. Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-siècle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn’t delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil’s night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents’ group donated a bench in the girls’ memory to our school. Originally slated to commemorate just Cecilia (the project had been put in motion eight months earlier, after the Day of Grieving), the bench was rededicated just in time to include the other girls as well. It was a small bench, made from a tree from the Upper Peninsula. “Virgin timber,” Mr. Krieger said, who had retooled the machinery at his air-filter factory in order to make the bench. The plaque bore the simple inscription
IN MEMORY OF THE LISBON GIRLS, DAUGHTERS OF THIS COMMUNITY
.