The Red Parts (3 page)

It’s only lately that I’ve realized that Winnicott is not suggesting that breakdowns do not recur. Now I see that he may be suggesting just the opposite: that a fear of breakdown in our past may be precisely what causes it to repeat in our future.

TO GET HOME to Muskegon for her spring break in late March 1969, Jane requested a ride via the campus ride board at the University of Michigan. She was going home to announce her engagement to her boyfriend, Phil, a professor of economics and fellow campus activist. Knowing her parents would not approve, she was going home alone to give them time to adjust to the news before Phil joined her a few days later. Over the telephone she arranged for a ride with a man who, unbeknownst to her, was using an alias. Phil said good-bye to her around 6:30 P.M. in her room at the Law Quad; her dead body was found about fourteen miles outside of Ann Arbor the following morning. She died from two gunshots to the head—one in her left temple, the other in her lower left skull. After she was dead, or fast approaching death, she was strangled viciously with a stocking that did not belong to her. Her body was dragged onto a stranger’s grave in a small, rural cemetery called Denton Cemetery, at the end of a gravel road known locally as a “lover’s lane.” Her jumper was pulled up, her pantyhose pulled down, her belongings meticulously arranged between her legs and around her body, which was then covered with her raincoat and abandoned.

After Jane’s murder—which was the third in a series of seven—my mother began to worry that she might be the next victim. As the case went unsolved, she kept worrying. Even visiting her sister’s grave was a fraught enterprise, as the police had told the family that Jane’s murderer might visit also. To mourn Jane was literally to risk encountering her killer.

Writing
Jane
, I realized this fear had trickled down to me also. An inheritance. I also knew from years of watching movies that the female detective—or, another favorite, the female professor—always has to pay for her curiosity and toughness by becoming the target of the killer himself.
One man is copying the most notorious killers in history. One at a time. Together, two women must stop him from killing again. Or they’re next
, reads the tagline for the 1995 serial-killer flick
Copycat
, starring Sigourney Weaver as an alcoholic, agoraphobic professor of “serial killer studies” and Holly Hunter as her counterpart, the tough female dick.

I tried to find a sense of humor about the cinematic, self-aggrandizing images I had of discovering some crucial piece of evidence that the “professionals” had overlooked, or of someday reading from
Jane
at a bookstore with her killer clandestinely seated in the audience. I reminded myself that Jane’s murderer might well have been John Collins, and told myself that even if Collins hadn’t done it, her murderer might no longer be alive—or if he was, he was likely in prison for something else. Or, even if he was alive and free, the chances were close to nil that he would ever find his way to a book of poetry, even if my aunt’s picture were on the cover. It was one of the few moments in my life in which poetry’s obscure cultural status felt heartening.

Any two-bit shrink, or fellow writer, could have pointed out that the danger I feared from my aunt’s phantom murderer—along with my closet hope that my project might somehow conjure him up—was but an extreme, ready-made metaphor for all the wild hopes and fears that can accompany the act of writing itself, especially writing about family stories that one’s family would rather leave untouched, untold. Several did, in fact, point this out.

That all seemed true enough, until Schroeder called and collapsed the metaphor.

WHEN
JANE
COMES out in March 2005, Schroeder will go through each poem with a highlighter. We will correspond about some details—where I got the information about the timing of a phone call Jane supposedly made on the night of her murder, if I know where he might find the guest book from Jane’s funeral that I mention, and so on.

I can honestly say that it’s the first book of poetry I’ve ever read
, he will write.

I will write back, equally honestly, that it’s the first I’ve ever written to be highlighted by a homicide detective.

IN THE WEEKS leading up to Leiterman’s arrest, I couldn’t stop myself from asking Schroeder if he thought Leiterman posed any danger to me or my family. It was an embarrassing question; it seemed to hoist years of pent-up irrationality into the light of day. But it was more discomfiting to think that a man who had been the object of generations of family fear was now getting up each morning, chatting with his family, and going about his daily business with no clue of his imminent arrest, or of the daily flurry of phone calls now taking place between my family and the Michigan State Police. The police had also made it clear that under no circumstances could he find out about the investigation, for fear he might flee, injure himself, or injure another.

Schroeder answered me kindly. He told me not to worry—that Leiterman was like a down-and-out Santa Claus with a bad heart and a fierce addiction to painkillers.
Let’s just say he’s not going to be climbing through any windows.
He added that although he, Schroeder, hadn’t met me yet, he’d be willing to bet that at the very least, I would be able to outrun the guy.

IF YOU WERE to ask my mother a few years ago how Jane’s murder affected the upbringing of her two daughters, she would have said that it did not. In a television interview that she and I eventually granted to a show from CBS,
48 Hours Mystery
, during Leiterman’s trial, my mother told the attractive, busty interviewer that she thought she had always been too “in control” to allow her sister’s death to affect her behavior in any substantive way. The realization that she may not have been as “in control” as she imagined—a realization delivered, in part, by reading
Jane
, which chronicles the many years she spent barricading doors, etc.—startled her.

My mother remains equally startled by the fact that her body gets hungry, has to go to the bathroom, or reacts to environmental factors such as altitude or temperature. She dreams of an impermeable, self-sufficient body, one not subject to uncontrollable needs or desires, be they its own or those of others. She dreams of a body that cannot be injured, violated, or sickened unless it chooses to be.

Recently my mother tripped while speaking to my sister Emily on the phone. She fell to the ground in her kitchen, and her tooth smashed up against her upper lip. Her lip was swollen beyond recognition for weeks, and the tooth died; eventually she had to have a root canal. On the phone, my sister had no idea that she had fallen, because our mother talked right through it. When Emily and I bug her about this cover-up after the fact, she protests,
What purpose could it possibly have served to tell Emily that I’d had an accident? She couldn’t have helped me, and it only would have made her worry.

She says the fall was too embarrassing to mention. I say that it might have been worth mentioning simply because it happened. We may as well be talking to each other from opposite ends of a cardboard tube.

By the time my mother and I find ourselves at the
48 Hours
interview, seated side by side in a wainscoted room at the U of M Law School that CBS has taken over for the shoot and lined with fruit, coffee, and cookies, it is the last day of Lieterman’s trial, and we will have spent weeks looking at autopsy photos of Jane projected on a big screen in the courtroom. I will have started to understand where my mother’s fantasy of a sovereign, impermeable self might have come from.

A medical examiner had described each of these photos out loud at the January hearing. There was no jury then, and thus no need for projected pictures. As the examiner spoke, tears streamed involuntarily from my eyes, from my sister’s eyes. But my mother did not cry. Her body simply collapsed in on itself. Her shoulders rounded over, her chest hollowed out, her whole body becoming more and more of a husk. Her knees shaking in spasms. I wanted to touch her but I didn’t know what kind of touch would help. First I tried pressing my hands down lightly on the top of her shaking thighs, then I put a hand to her back. She did not respond to either. It was clear that she had entered a world beyond touch, a world beyond comfort.

My sister and I escaped to the bathroom at a break, and there Emily told me that she could barely look at our mother. She simply could not bear to see her in so much pain. I agreed, but did not confess to the less-admirable emotion. I also felt angry. I wanted our mother to meet these details with squared shoulders. I couldn’t bear the way this man’s words were shriveling her body into that of a little girl. I didn’t want her to turn away; I didn’t want her to shake. As I watched my beautiful sister wash and dry her hands and apply lipstick I tried to imagine how I’d feel if I were looking at autopsy photos of her on a big screen instead of Jane; the thought brought a quick flash of guilt and paralysis, followed by a wave of nausea. This was my mother’s sister. What was I expecting?

You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father’s service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice
, writes Angela Carter in her retelling of the Bluebeard myth.

In Carter’s version of the story, Bluebeard does not murder his young bride. Instead her mother arrives in the nick of time and puts “a single, irreproachable bullet” through Bluebeard’s head.

Is this what I was hoping for?

A
ND SO I HAVE dreamt for years of confronting some sinister, composite epitome of male violence and power, the murderer I always presumed to be Jane’s. Sometimes he is a faceless shadow; other times he has the face of someone I know. Sometimes my mother and sister are there, and we help each other. Other times we are all there but we don’t help each other, either because we can’t or we won’t. Most often I am alone.

My only other image of Jane’s potential murderer was that of John Collins, who, at the time of his arrest, was a young, handsome white boy, and apparently quite the charmer.
Lucky with the ladies
, as they say.

HOLDING HANDS, sitting side by side on our bench at the January hearing, my mother, Emily, and I now watch an overweight, bespectacled, sixty-two-year-old man in a forest-green prison jumpsuit shuffle into the courtroom. He is mostly bald, with white, craggy hair in a crescent shape, and a face full of whiskers, which he runs his hands over frequently. He has a large, bulbous nose that occasionally flushes dark red, and small, stunned eyes. Under the defense table, his feet lie flat against the floor, shackled at the ankles, in black socks and plastic brown prison sandals. Periodically he takes off his glasses and cleans them with the edge of his green prison shirt, then squints back out at the courtroom. The few times he turns around to scan the entire room he looks completely disoriented, as if he has no idea where he is.

I feel disoriented too. Where I imagined I might find the “face of evil,” I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd.

On this day Leiterman spends a lot of time watching his hands, which for the most part stay in a steepled position in front of his face or against his swollen belly. I am reminded of his nursing career by the way he shoots into action when anyone in the courtroom needs to put on latex gloves to handle evidence. Otherwise fairly motionless, he quickly picks up the box of powdered gloves and shakes it out to witnesses or lawyers whenever they need them, often a moment before the need arises, with a nurse’s instinct for protection. In the late afternoon a deep shaft of sunlight moves over the courtroom, and eventually lands on the defense table. Everyone else shifts positions or moves seats to get out of it, but Leiterman cannot move, he has to abide it. I watch the sun saturate his face and body, watch him shield his face with his hands in vain. Just as he instinctively offers up the gloves, I feel the urge to shield him, to block the sun with my body, or at least pull down a shade.

We stay planted in our positions; I watch the light move over him.

I watch the light and I watch his hands and I try to imagine them around the trigger of a gun, I try to imagine them strangling someone. Strangling Jane. I know this kind of imagining is useless and awful. I wonder how I’d feel if I imagined it over and over again and later found out that he didn’t do it. I stare at him all day as if a sign were about to come down from the heavens to indicate his guilt or innocence. It doesn’t come.

The purpose of the January hearing is to lay out the bare bones of the case before a judge: to prove that a homicide was committed, to confirm that the victim was Jane, to offer enough probable cause to warrant a full trial, to determine whether Leiterman should remain in custody until that trial, and if so, to post or deny bail, and so on. On this day my grandfather is the first witness called to the stand. Everyone in the courtroom worries a bit as he totters in and out of the witness box; it seems an especially cruel moment to bust a hip.