Deaths of Jocasta (57 page)

“Okay.” Cordelia nodded.

She fished the car keys out of my pocket, started the car, and pulled away.

At the hospital, I tried to get out of the car and stand up to prevent the “me Jane” approach to transportation.

Cordelia was still in Tarzan mode, however, and picked me up, saying, “You’ll get more attention this way.”

She carried me into the emergency room.

I don’t know whether it was her carrying me or that I was still splattered with Frankenstein’s blood or the familiarity with which she said, “Hi, Albert, I’ve got a strangulation victim here,” to the man behind the desk, but we got attention. First from a nervous intern who, after a few pointed questions from Cordelia, gave way to the head of the emergency room.

After a painful exam (I guess I reacted to the pain in a lively enough manner that they were assured I wouldn’t die) I was taken to a room. I gathered that I was not to be released tonight. Cordelia was with me most of the time, only disappearing briefly to wash the blood off her face.

She would behave the same way if it were Danny or Joanne, I told myself. Don’t let her concern get your hopes up too high. But, of course, I did.

She sat on the side on my bed, absentmindedly drying her face with a paper towel.

“Excuse me, it’s after visiting hours,” an official voice said from out in the hallway. “Are you related?”

“Yes, I am. That’s my sister in there,” came the reply.

Danny entered. I think the hallway monitor was more impressed by the D.A.’s office identification she was putting away than her claim to be my sister.

“Elly’s taking Bernie home,” Danny explained. “Ms. Knight, I must say, you’ve had a busy day.” She sat on the other side of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Not very talkative,” Cordelia answered.

“No? I still want to hear about this morning.” When I didn’t reply, Danny caught on. “You mean she can’t talk?”

Cordelia nodded.

“Any chance it’s permanent?” Danny asked, a slow smile spreading over her face.

Cordelia started giving her the technical answer, until she noticed Danny’s glee.

“This is definitely the most novel position I’ve ever found Mick in,” Danny said cheerfully. “Silent and in bed all by herself.”

Fortunately there are other means of communication besides verbal. I made the appropriate hand gesture.

Danny was still chortling much too happily when the official voice again inquired, “Are you related?”

“Of course I am. That’s my dear, sainted mother in there,” followed by a familiar grunt. O’Connor entered.

“I have a few questions,” he said.

“She can’t talk,” Cordelia told him.

“Yes or no will do,” he replied. “Was the man who attacked you in the parking lot the same one who abducted you earlier?”

I nodded yes.

He handed me a picture. “Is this the man who tried to blow you up this morning?”

Again I nodded yes.

“Bill Dolton, Choirboy to you, has confessed. I guess God finally got to him. He helped Frankenstein kidnap the women, though he claims he didn’t know they were to be murdered until too late.”

“Too late for whom?” Danny interjected. “To save any of the women or avoid a murder rap?”

O’Connor gave a tired shrug. “Frankenstein, Bill Mahoney, worked as an orderly in some hospital, wanted to be a doctor, but couldn’t even keep his orderly job. I just finished searching his apartment. He had a couple of medical textbooks on abortion. With what to avoid marked in yellow highlighter. He learned enough about abortions to botch them.” O’Connor paused for a moment, taking a deep breath, then continued, “Choirboy claims Frankenstein got the dynamite for Sarafin. He just put the bombs where they told him to. Empty buildings, he thought.”

I made an angry gesture.

“Which we know is bullshit,” O’Connor said. “His two partners are dead. Why not put as much blame on them as possible?” He continued, “I would like to get a statement from you, Dr. James. I know you’ve had a long day, but if you don’t mind?”

“It’s okay. Can we do it somewhere else? Micky should get some rest. She’ll just want to ask questions if we hang about.”

“I won’t stay very long,” Danny assured her.

“I’m borrowing your car. You won’t need it for a while,” were Cordelia’s parting words for me. She followed O’Connor out.

“You are going to have one hell of a bruise,” Danny observed, looking at my throat.

I nodded.

“Anything I can do?”

Ice cream came to mind, but I stoically shook my head no.

“Good. Then let me start on the list of all the things I wanted to say but didn’t, because I knew that smart mouth of yours would make me regret it.”

I reached out and took Danny’s hand, kissing it softly on the palm.

“Damn,” she said, blinking. “I can’t think of a thing. Except I am so glad you pulled out of this one.”

“Are you related?” emanated from the hall.

“No. Fortunately,” came the reply.

Joanne came in, followed by Alex.

“Hail the conquering hero,” Alex said. “Hi, Danny.”

“She can’t talk,” Danny cheerfully informed them.

“Yeah?” Joanne asked, returning Danny’s grin. “I’ll be damned, a silent Micky Knight.”

“But I wanted to hear your adventures,” Alex lamented. “Where’s C.J.?”

“With O’Connor. Doing her civic duty,” Danny said.

Joanne and Danny did their best to fill Alex in on the day’s numerous events. I tried to pay attention, but my throat was a pain in the neck. I was also starting to nod out.

Elly arrived to retrieve Danny. And, nurse that she was, she shooed everyone out, telling them to let me get my rest.

The minute they were gone, I missed them. Particularly since I knew they were probably going to convene at Danny’s and Elly’s to talk, party, and…eat ice cream.

It’s over, I thought as I dozed off, relieved that no more bombs would be exploding, no more women cast as unwilling Jocastas. Then I realized it was all over. No excuses to go back to the clinic to see Cordelia. No clinic. Well, she’ll have to give my car back, I consoled myself. Unless she leaves it with Danny.

I counted ice cream flavors and fell asleep.

The next day, a little after lunch (applesauce), Emma and Rachel came by to pick me up.

“You’re going to spend a week or so out in the country,” Emma informed me, handing me some clean clothes. “Your friend Danny helped us get the things you’ll need from your place.”

I winced at the thought of Emma prowling through my drawers. Hell, just my apartment.

“You are bruised all over, Micky, girl,” Rachel said as I shrugged off my hospital gown.

I quickly dressed, embarrassed by both my bruises and nakedness under Rachel’s and Emma’s scrutiny.

We checked out of the hospital.

After making sure I was comfortably positioned in the back seat, we drove out of the city, heading across Lake Pontchartrain.

Listening to Emma and Rachel talking in the front seat, I suddenly realized: they’re lovers. It wasn’t what they said, but the tone of voice, perhaps body position as they conversed, that bespoke intimacy.

I’m an idiot, I thought, for not having noticed before. Separate rooms were only a token nod to decorum, to circumvent the racial and sexual rules of the South. Or perhaps a harsh necessity. What had it been like, thirty years ago? Before Stonewall? Before even Rosa Parks?

I had first met Emma when I was just seventeen. She was Miss Auerbach to me and I didn’t know enough or dare enough to look under the surfaces I was shown. She and Rachel were both in their late forties then. Afraid as I was that Emma wanted something sexual from me, I was more than willing to see only the scholarly, asexual spinster front she presented. In some way, I realized, I had demanded the distance, building a wall of reserve between us to protect myself. Emma had always respected that distance.

I recalled that horrible last year of high school. I was aloof and a loner there, despising that ugly house in Metairie that I had to return to. I didn’t have many friends. I couldn’t risk it. I knew what I was. Queer. A pervert. I was haunted by a constant refrain of “if only they knew…” Every time a teacher wrote “good” on a paper, every time someone said hello in the hallway.

From school I went to work, a local burger place that left me with the smell of day-old cooking oil and greasy ground beef, even after a long scrubbing shower. Then I went to Aunt Greta’s house, where I lived. It wasn’t home, I couldn’t call it that.

Bayard was there on weekends. He was still taking courses at LSU to graduate in December. He came home on Fridays and left on Mondays. I did the best I could to avoid him on those weekends, taking extra shifts at the burger joint, barricading myself with Uncle Claude and feigning interest in whatever TV show he was watching. But after Christmas, Bayard would be living at home. And I would be like a caged animal with only a small area in which to run from him. I dreaded the thought of December.

Late in November, one of my teachers, Miss Silver—I later found out she was a lesbian—was handing back papers and mine “just happened” to be on the bottom, making me the last student there. She gave me my paper and a business card, saying, “Call her, I think you need to talk to someone.” That was all. The card was for Rene Harper, a social worker at the local health clinic. And, I suspected, Miss Silver’s lover at the time, but I never did find out.

I did need to talk. I told her everything. Almost everything, I was still too ashamed to mention incest. I told her that I preferred women, though it took a few sessions for me to admit that I was sexually active.

One day, she asked if I would be interested in earning money helping organize and catalogue a private library. It was Emma’s, of course. I was so nervous on that interview, feeling very out of place in her Garden District home. I was sure that she would spot me as perverted bayou trash. But at the end of the interview she asked me when I could start.

Several weeks later, Emma offhandedly inquired where I was going to college. The question caught me off guard because I had never thought about going to college. I didn’t have an answer.

A few days later, Emma handed me a sheaf of college applications and told me that my job that week was to fill them out. I did as I was told, but I knew it was impossible. Aunt Greta wouldn’t let me go part-time to UNO, let alone the places Emma was having me apply to. I remembered resenting Emma for making me want something I couldn’t have.

The holidays came and went. Bayard was home, in no hurry to get a job. I stayed out late, changed my hours, snuck around, but I didn’t always get by him.

My eighteenth birthday was on the last day of February. I decided that on that day I was going to leave Aunt Greta’s house. I realized that I would have to drop out of school. But I couldn’t stay there any longer.

I didn’t tell anyone. I knew they wouldn’t understand or approve.

Until, one day in early February, Emma came into the library to talk to me about college, telling me she had spoken to some people who were quite impressed with me and thought I had a good chance at…

Something in me broke, the control I thought I had. I couldn’t bear Emma’s animated face telling me what I knew to be impossible.

“I’m not going to college,” I burst out. “I can’t. I can’t live in that house anymore.” Then I cried, I just sat down and cried, unable to hold back my despair anymore.

Emma put her hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off, humiliated at breaking down and sobbing in front of her. A few minutes later, Rachel came in, wrapped her arms around me, and led me to the office she had near the kitchen. She held me until I cried myself out. I told her about dropping out of school and leaving on my eighteenth birthday, that I couldn’t stand to live with Aunt Greta a day beyond that.

The next day Emma was waiting for me when I came to work. She told me that it was all arranged, she had talked to her lawyers. On my eighteenth birthday, I would come and stay with her, finish high school, and go to college.

She brushed off my attempt to thank her by saying she had plenty of room and, besides, I was such a hard worker she didn’t want to lose me.

Emma kept her word. At midnight on February 28, she drove out to that ugly Metairie house and got me and my few belongings.

I lived with Rachel and Emma until I went off to college in the fall. I became one of Emma’s “girls,” women who received money from the scholarship fund she had established.

I had, in some way, been closer to Rachel, spending more time with her. I sensed some equality between them, knew that Rachel wasn’t just a servant, but she and Emma kept their sexuality carefully hidden from view, mine included. (I don’t guess they knew I was a lesbian for sure until I was twenty-one and Rachel caught me with another woman in a very compromising position on her kitchen table.)

I’m ashamed to say that the idea that these two women could be lovers wasn’t a possibility to the eighteen-year-old that I was. Partly it was race, class, those ugly things I was only beginning to see beyond, but also my own conflicted views about sex and love. It was easier and safer for me to believe completely in their asexual front. If Emma was a sexless spinster, she wouldn’t want from me what Bayard said she would want.