The Red Parts (11 page)

I hadn’t written on a legal pad for years. But now I was remembering that I started out writing many years ago on my father’s long yellow legal pads. After my parents’ divorce, my father occasionally found himself stuck with Emily and me on days when he had to go to work, and he would bring us with him “into the office”—a law firm perched atop a glorious skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. Once up there, to keep me busy, he would give me a legal pad and a pen. That way I could pretend that I, too, was hard at work. My job was to write down everything that happened in the room—my father’s hectic pacing, his wild gesticulations on the phone, visits from fellow lawyers, Emily’s annoying behavior, the view of the slate-gray harbor below.

After my day of work I would hand my legal pads over to my father for his perusal. He thought they were brilliant. Back in the day when people unthinkingly used their secretaries for terribly inappropriate tasks, he asked his to type them up so they would look more “official”—one long story, told in episodes, entitled
A Day at the Office.

When I was nine or so this penchant for reportage swerved into an obsession with a tape recorder with which I attempted surreptitiously to record the conversations of my family and friends for about a year. This was before the dawn of the miniature age, the Age of the iPod, and my tape recorder was mammoth, about the size of a portable record player. I had to swaddle it in several blankets or jackets to make it “invisible.”

My most successful covert recording from this time captured a conversation during a car ride in which my father was taking me, my best friend Jeanne, Emily, and her best friend China to an ice skating rink. At one point on the tape we pass by a car that has been pulled over by the cops.
The pigs sure are out tonight
, says my father. From the backseat eleven-year-old China warns that you have to be careful with cops. She says she recently heard a story about some cops who came upon a woman being raped, and instead of stopping the rape, they helped.

They helped
rape
her
, China clarifies.

Who told you that? Your mother?
my father asks.

China’s mother was Grace Slick, of the Jefferson Airplane, by this point the Jefferson Starship.

China cackles, then snorts.

I can see it now, on your parents’ next album
, my father says. “
Snorts by China.”

China snorts again.

Then I pipe in:
Daddy, why don’t women rape men?

Good question
, he muses.
What do you think?

I don’t think women have the passion
, I say, with nine-year-old authority.

That’s not why, Maggie
, Emily says, deeply irritated.
It’s not because they don’t have the
passion.

MY FATHER wanted me to be a writer. Actually he wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be. Anything I expressed interest in, he would cut out articles about and leave on my pillow for me to discover when I went to bed. In an attempt to make up for the hardship of the divorce, he let Emily and me decorate our rooms at his new house in any way we wanted. I wanted everything in rainbows. I got it. Emily wanted purple everything, purple lamp shades, purple carpet, purple bedspread. She got it, too.

Our life with him in this house was colorful, hedonistic, and brief. Rainbows of light streamed through the stained-glass rainbow that dangled from gold string in front of my bedroom window. I got a pair of rainbow-striped overalls and wore them nearly constantly. He shepherded Stouffer’s Macaroni and Beef around on dinner plates and served them to us by candlelight. I performed improvised dance routines for him nightly in his living room, accompanied by loud music from his record collection. Tom Waits. Joni Mitchell. Harry Nilsson. Bob Dylan. He graciously watched these performances from the couch with a lowball of Jack Daniel’s in his hand, sometimes nodding off, but always clapping loudly and whistling after my final bow. Other nights he would play the guitar and sing while I climbed onto his back and held on like a monkey. Women came and went, women who would beg along with us,
C’mon, Dad, let’s go get ice cream.
At least two were named Candy. There were two Marthas, an Ellen, a Vicki, and two Wendys. At Christmas he bought boxes and boxes of silver tinsel for us to decorate the tree, as tinsel had been forbidden by my mother. Christmas at his house that year was an orgy of tinsel. He would die four weeks later.

For her part, after the divorce my mother had become increasingly taken with the ideal of a minimalist Christmas tree: sparse branches that reached horizontally, decorated solely with white lights, red shellacked apples, and plaid bows. She also took to hanging up a red felt scroll with black-and-white photos of her new husband affixed to it, photos taken when he was a toddler, in the late ‘50s, sitting on Santa’s lap in a tweed overcoat and looking about as petulant as he looked to me now.
Isn’t he adorable
, she said each time she passed it. With a kind of measured sadism whose roots continue to elude me, each Christmas my stepfather would wrap up the Chinese Yellow Pages (which my mother couldn’t read) and blank VHS tapes (which she had no use for) to give to her as gifts, as if to remind her that he hated the holidays, hated gift-giving, and perhaps on some level hated her (and by extension, us), and that he was committed to performing these hatreds each year with a Dadaesque spirit of invention.

But there was a trick: one year he planted a pair of real pearl earrings at the bottom of this pile of wrapped Wal-Mart garbage, so in subsequent years our mother never knew if a treasure were coming. It never did, but the tension remained high; her disappointment, acute.

After several years of this my mother decided that we should start skipping Christmas altogether and go instead to Mexico, which we then did for a few years in a row. I remember my stepfather being there with us only once. I liked going to Mexico, which generally consisted of climbing steep ruins by day and getting drunk with my mother in beachside bars at night, but the trip always gave me the uneasy feeling that we were on the lam, running from something other than Christmas.

IN COURT my mother and I quickly discover that sitting bench for eight or nine hours at a time on the bench is going to be hard on our bodies, so after the first week of the trial we strip the cushions off Jill’s porch furniture The Red Parts 104 and start bringing them to court. Solly also starts bringing a cushion. But the cushions only go so far. When I begin to have serious pain down one of my legs and in shoulder, I tell my mother that I might look into getting a massage somewhere in town.

Go ahead, she says, but personally, she considers massages sybaritic.

I don’t know what the word means, so I ignore both it and her.

During the trial I try not to look at what my mother is writing down on her legal pad, but when I do, I notice that we gravitate toward the same details. And I begin to wonder if this is really her story to tell, and if I’m stealing it from her, even now.

Weeks later, back in Connecticut, I look the word up.
Sybarite: a person devoted to pleasure; a voluptuary.
From the Latin
Sybarita
, a native of Sybaris, Italy, whose ancient Greek inhabitants were known for their “notorious luxury.”

Apparently my mother also feels it is too sybaritic to sleep with the air conditioner on in her bedroom at Jill’s—she says it would be unfair to me, as I do not have one in my little hothouse of a room. The nights are terribly uncomfortable, however, so she ends up making a sort of compromise: each night she turns the air conditioner on, but leaves her windows and door wide open. I try to convince her of the idiocy of this enterprise but she’s resolute. During the first week, I get up in the middle of the night, climb out of my twin bed across the hall, and shut her door while she’s asleep. I want more privacy, and I suspect she will sleep better if she can at least get cool. But soon I tire of this ritual. After listening to her toss and turn one night, along with the loud, useless hum of the air conditioner, I strip the sheet off my bed, take it downstairs, and start sleeping on the couch.

B
ECAUSE JANE’S boyfriend Phil was the last person to see Jane alive on March 20, 1969, the state has subpoenaed him to appear at the trial. But that’s not quite right: the state has asked him to appear, but it did not subpoena him, because you cannot subpoena someone who lives outside the United States. He agrees to come testify, and I find myself feeling a little guilty—I know he doesn’t want to, and I was the one who passed information about his whereabouts along to Schroeder back in November. At the time Schroeder joked that I should consider becoming a detective myself, as they’d been looking for Phil for some time with no luck. This perplexed me, as I had found him with one phone call and one overseas letter.

In the time since, Phil and I have met twice for breakfast in Brooklyn, where he keeps an apartment; my mother and I have also flown to see him in London, where we visited for a week with him and his longtime partner, a healthcare activist named Henie. Seeing my mother and Phil greet each other at the London airport after more than thirty years apart made the whole psychotic enterprise of
Jane
seem momentarily worthwhile—restorative, even, albeit in a jagged sort of way.

Phil arrives in Ann Arbor the night before he is to testify, and the state puts him up in the same motel in which my grandfather is staying the night. My mother and I plan to have dinner with Phil alone, partly to catch up, but partly to strategize his encounter with my grandfather. They haven’t seen each other since Jane’s funeral, and Phil knew then that her father did not approve of him or the relationship. And then there was the icy fact that for some time Phil was also considered a prime suspect in Jane’s death, so not only did he suffer the loss of the woman he loved, but he also had to suffer through police interrogations, suspicion from all quarters, searches of his home and car, etc.

When you find the guy
, Phil told the police after they were through with him,
I hope you respect his civil rights more than you’ve respected mine.

The police could not believe that someone who was planning to marry Jane would speak this way about her killer, so they hauled him back in for more questioning.

Now he bounds out of the motel looking great—an academic version of Richard Gere, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. He says he wants to drive by his old house in Ann Arbor, and before long we find ourselves sitting on a brick patio under an umbrella, drinking margaritas, facing the house he used to inhabit, which is now a gay bookstore flanked by this outdoor bar and a Thai restaurant.

For a while Phil stares incredulously at his old house—at the rainbow flag hanging over its door, the customers milling about in its living room—and tells us what it used to look like inside, how it was to be there with Jane. Then his tone suddenly swerves out of the nostalgic and into the interrogatory. He wants to know why my mother and I have committed to attending the whole trial. Why, and for whom, exactly, we think we’re there.

We’re here for Jane
, my mother says plaintively, as if this should be obvious.

I nod in support, even though something about it doesn’t ring true. Jane is, after all, quite dead. We’re talking about what the living need, or what the living imagine the dead need, or what the living imagine the dead would have wanted were they not dead. But the dead are the dead. Presumably they have finished with wanting.

“To the living we owe respect, / To the dead we owe the truth.” ~Voltaire.~ Violent Crimes Unit/Michigan State Police
, reads the tagline under each e-mail we receive from Schroeder.

I know I speak for my family in saying we concur with the Voltaire quotation ending your message
, my mother writes him back.

It’s the
state’s
case
, Phil now says, with no small portion of disgust.
It doesn’t have anything to do with Jane. In fact, she would have hated it.

My mother and I fidget with the paper umbrellas in our drinks, feeling unexpectedly chastised. He’s right: it is not, thankfully, Jane Louise Mixer v. Gary Earl Leiterman. Nor is it Jane Louise Mixer’s surviving family v. Gary Earl Leiterman. It is the State of Michigan v. Gary Earl Leiterman. Sitting in court you never forget this fact: you sit squarely facing the judge, who hunkers down in his great black robe in front of a green and white marble wall, an enormous bronze seal of Michigan mounted behind him. The seal consists of an elk and a moose on their hind legs in bas relief, leaning against a crest, which, in turn, depicts a man holding a long gun, beholding a sunrise, underneath the word
TUEBOR
:
I will defend.
Then, wrapped around the bottom of the seal, the state motto:
Si Quaeris Peninsulum Amoenam Circumspice. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

But would Jane have hated the trial? She herself was studying to become a lawyer—not a criminal lawyer, but a lawyer nonetheless.
As long as I knew her, she talked about being a lawyer
, her high school teacher told the
Detroit News
a few days after her death.
It was her one ambition.
In 1969 Jane was one of thirty-seven female law students in a class of 420. She spent the last few years of her life working on political campaigns and educating herself about civil rights litigation. In the wake of her death, the law school established the Jane L. Mixer Memorial Award to honor students who demonstrate the most profound commitment to social justice and civil rights. Growing up I always assumed my grandparents set up this award, but I should have known better. In my research for
Jane
I learned that friends of hers set it up in 1970 and have maintained it ever since. Before her case was reopened, initial online searches for “Jane Mixer” mostly conjured up information about former law students who had won this award and later included it on their online CVs. Jane may not have lived long enough to leave behind any “legacy,” but if she began one at all, this constellation of political activists, public interest lawyers, and social workers, linked together by her name in cyberspace, might be part of it.