Concrete Angel (4 page)

No one but Dr. Bailey monitored my behavior. Children were still ceded some protection from the media glare unless you were Lana Turner’s kid. At school, I continued my long-standing role as the too-smart girl who kept to herself. It was safer to play it like that. None of my classmates asked about my summer vacation, but it was a new school and I had few friends. For once I was happy to be one of the anonymous ones in middle school—one of those kids who walked home alone looking at the ground, kicking at the leaves so they appeared occupied in thought rather than lonely. If anyone accompanied me, it was the boy with his glasses held together with tape, the new girl who didn’t know anyone yet, a stray dog sniffing at my heels.

Mother and I sat side by side on Dr. B’s slightly faded black-and-white checkered loveseat until his door opened. Mother would immediately fix her best evil eye on his, daring him to undermine her. I marched into his office week after week and told him stories of my pre-teenage crushes, my straight As in school, my bouts with insomnia—all material perfected beforehand by Mother, an expert in such details. It was a rare occasion when an uncharted sentence escaped my lips.

Some of the material she invented sent us into giggling fits the night before a session.

“See if he doesn’t have a cow over this incident,” Mother’d say when she thought of a particularly good idea—a colorful line to sling at him. “I bet he’ll do his little cough when he hears it.”

I enjoyed the camaraderie these visits necessitated, loved having Mother’s attention for hours more than usual each week. Only later would I realize her manipulation of my therapy made it impossible for those sessions to do me any good.

Though I was not a murderer, I badly needed someone’s help, someone who might shine a light on my relationship with my mother, tell me it wasn’t normal for a mother to see her daughter as someone to manipulate, to use. Such insight from a therapist skilled in breaking through a fa
ç
ade might have saved me years of pain.

But when I told Dr. B something even remotely troubling, he coughed lightly, guiding me, through respiratory cues, to a safer topic. Confronting my mother on any issue inadvertently arising in his office was not in his playbook. His unintentional collusion with Mother in manufacturing a fairly safe neurosis for me might just as well have been deliberate.

“Tell yourself a story,” he suggested when I complained about not sleeping. Or, “Those straight A’s will get you into a fine college.”

Banalities and set pieces of advice were the only therapeutic tools I saw. It’d been decided at some point I misunderstood what I saw in my living room. And that I was not a murderer. Instead I was a frightened child protecting her mother.

After each session, Mother and I went for a hot-fudge sundae, or a lime rickey, or a cheesesteak and fries. Anything I wanted. And there I’d report on my session more fully.

“I love your father paying for it all,” she said once. “Makes the whole thing worthwhile.” The haze of cigarette smoke, exhaled unhurriedly from her pink lips, engulfed our table. Those were some of the most intimate moments in my life.

“Worthwhile?”

She shrugged. “Turning dross into gold—something like that.”

I wondered, too, if by “the whole thing” she meant Jerry’s death or my being thought of as a murderess. But probably it was the burden of driving me to his office and wasting her Saturday mornings. I could’ve taken a bus by myself, of course, but she wanted to appear the doting mother. And she was, in her own way. Monitoring the sessions became less important as the therapy dragged on for the months the court demanded. Cy had probably recommended such vigilance. He needn’t have. Mother always took a healthy interest in protecting herself. It was Dr. B. who was most disturbed by the length of the sentence. It grew progressively harder to think of things to say to each other.

I didn’t mention my mother unless prodded, and only then when it felt like
not discussing
her was going to get us into trouble. I always thought of it as “us.” It was “we” who were in a fix. “We” who had to improvise a solution. There’d hardly been a moment of my life when Mother was not at its center. I assumed it was similar for all children: a child’s life was not truly her own, nor should she want it to be.

My father was fair game for discussion though and guilty of all the clichés you could list about a former military man: rigid yet indulgent, smart but only in a narrow sense, demanding of perfection, yet pleased when he had to rescue us—before the divorce, at least. I needed to hand someone over to my therapist, and Daddy was the prime candidate. I focused unfairly on Daddy as the “problem” and fired away.

“Daddy doesn’t visit me.” Or, “Daddy never invites me to stay at his house.” Or, “When I showed Daddy my report card, he said I needed to work harder if I wanted the Ivy League.” This was all true.

Dr. Bailey raised his eyebrows, and I moved on.

No one else, including my grandparents, much entered into our chats. If this sounds disloyal, remember Daddy saw me less than once a month over the next five years; Mother and I often slept in the same bed. It was not unusual to wake and find my arms wrapped around her in a near stranglehold. My nocturnal grip never woke her.

By the end of my therapy, Dr. Bailey must have known the story I’d told the police, a social worker, a judge—wasn’t true. I got vaguer on details, more confused over events since the initial neon clarity had faded. Mother and I hadn’t practiced it often enough. She’d avoided a return to that night, perhaps having forgotten her exact lies.

And Dr. Bailey was probably too weary of Mother’s presence in his outer sanctum to relive that night. Frightened of the swarm of female hormones rushing across the waiting room toward him each time he opened the door, scared of the spidery arms waving a cigarette around the room despite the “No Smoking” sign, scared too of the deep throaty laugh often erupting at his expense, scared to death of a woman who’d murdered a soda salesman with no known bad habits and let her daughter take the rap. Well, I was too.

He wasn’t prepared for me either. His typical, wealthy adolescent patient was one who didn’t make friends easily, got into fights at school, or told too many lies. Or perhaps a girl who suffered an eating disorder or sneaked drinks from her parents’ liquor cabinet. He hadn’t listened to the oddly prosaic rambling of a murderess before. Never one with a mother scarier than her daughter. He stood, mouth open, at the door of his office, his “Whip Inflation Now” coffee cup in hand, and gazed at my mother like you’d gaze at the Sphinx.

“Am I the only mother who waits for her child? Do the rest of your patients find their way here alone?” she demanded one day, holding a pile of children’s magazines. “
Jack and Jill?
American Miss
,
Seventeen?
Really
?
”

The next week, a fresh copy of
Vogue
sat on the table and Mother grabbed it with a squeak of delight. She put it inside her handbag when we left.

“Well, so what? He picked it up for me, right? Who else’s going read
Vogue
in this nuthouse?” She glanced at it again, saying, “See his name isn’t on the cover. He bought this at a newsstand. Probably afraid to look fruity to the mailman.”

“Nothing like this will happen again,” my mother assured me throughout my therapy, after it ended, and for years after that. “I’m off men for good, Christine.”

It wasn’t true. New men would appear with regularity, always bringing us trouble. Or, more often perhaps, she’d bring trouble to them.

Therapy ended, and I mostly regretted it. There were no more cheeseburgers at the Hot Shoppe, no more giggling over what I should say next week. We resumed our life without Daddy, dreariness set in. The neon colors of the night of the murder, of those Saturday sessions at Dr. Bailey’s, began to fade.

Bu before the divorce, even before what happened with Jerry Santini, my mother and I were irrevocably entwined.

I
think I was born knowing my mother was different from other mothers: prettier, more fun, more acquisitive—though I didn’t know the word. I certainly knew she was more trouble. Not a day went by when I wasn’t reminded.

“Your mother always wanted
things
, Christine. We hoped she’d outgrow it.” Grandmother’s voice was a whisper even though my mother wasn’t around.

I was perhaps seven years old and as usual Mother was the topic of conversation. What else was there in our shared world? Also, as usual, Grandmother was defending her parenting more than my mother’s behavior.

“It was hard for her to let go of having something once she got in her head. The day the
Sears Catalog
arrived was always a big one. It kept her occupied for weeks. I remember the time she insisted on me calling her “Little Princess.” Grandmother laughed nervously. “Luckily Herbert didn’t hear it. He would’ve had a fit. Perhaps it wasn’t a
good
idea, but the boy next door wore a bath towel clipped to his collar for six months around that time, always jumping off of porch rails and trash cans. Superman, I guess. After his behavior, calling Evelyn “Little Princess” was pretty tame.”

“Maybe she got her ideas from TV.”

My grandmother was skeptical. “We didn’t have a TV until Evelyn was in high school, and nobody turned it on much. Your grandfather hated the din.” She said the word “din” carefully; as if it was the first time she’d used it aloud. “What do you think, Christine? Why does she want so many things? Why didn’t she outgrow it?”

By a young age, I had a clear idea of the sort of things Mother wanted and could see the peril in certain objects from across a store.

Sometimes—and this was far worse—I could see desire creeping across her face from across a room in someone’s house. I dreaded the occasions when Bucks Country matrons, back in the day when we were still with Daddy, left us alone while they went to get us lemonade and cookies. Mother’s eyes would light on various items, and it was easy to imagine her sizing the odds in making off with a glass figurine without getting caught. Would Mrs. Crane remember how many Dresden figurines filled her mahogany cabinet? Maybe the red ceramic fox on the bottom shelf could go missing.

If Mother rose from her chair, I rose with her, shadowing her like a ghost. She didn’t pull these tricks on the rare occasions Daddy was along, but if he was absent from the festivities, she regarded me as her ally. Winking at me, as her hand grazed a pretty trinket.

“Maybe it was the movies,” I said to my grandmother, still trying to be helpful. “Maybe Mother wanted to be like Liz Taylor or Grace Kelly. Glamorous.” I’d seen my mother’s old movie magazines on shelves in the basement and those two actresses were often on the covers. In my opinion, Mother’s life with Daddy was not so different than theirs. But there was more to Mother’s difficulties than a need for glamour. I don’t know when this became evident.

My grandmother nodded, but hesitantly. “My mother—your great-grandmother—worshipped movie stars. Lillian Gish, Clara Bow. Frankly, I never saw any sense in admiring someone for her looks. I tried to impress this on Evelyn, but…” She paused, and we each took a thoughtful sip of our hot chocolate.

“Now me, I admire Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth,” she said with fervor. “She was called to his side at a young age, you know. Following God’s plan for her.”

An often told tale, Grandmother had gone on the church bus to a Billy Graham Crusade meeting in downtown Philly several years before, coming home struck by his wife rather than Billy.

“Ruth saw her calling as clearly as Billy saw his.” Grandmother’s face flushed with the memory. “I’d never thought about being a helpmeet before. There’s nobility in such service.”

One of Billy’s books sat proudly on her end table, signed by the great man himself. But it was a photograph of Ruth that held pride of place on their mantel. Grandmother was making her way through the Bible for the third time. If I really wanted to please her, I’d memorize a verse to recite over lunch. An especially long one might earn me a quarter.

Grandfather Hobart was even more at sea with his daughter, and in the years before he died, he often sneaked off to his woodworking projects in the garage once he’d hugged us, asked about what new thing I’d learned in school, Mother’s constant headaches, if we needed any money, how the printing business my dad’s family owned was doing.