Bestial (6 page)

The work was strictly menial. What redeemed it from absolute drudgery was the presence of a congenial co-worker, a cleaning lady in the maternity ward, who cast a spell of enchantment over Earle.

To other eyes, her charms were not quite as evident as they were to his. Even she was bewildered by the young man’s regard. No one else in her life had ever lavished such attention on her, and she had already lived a considerable span.

Her name was Mary Teresa Martin. She was a pinched and gray-haired spinster who resided in a boardinghouse a short trolley-ride away from the hospital. In the spring of
1919, she had just turned fifty-eight and looked every day of it.

Her other co-workers regarded Mary as a sweet, if mousy, old maid. Painfully shy, she could be tongue-tied to the point of incoherence around other adults. Addressed by her supervisor, Mary would cast her eyes downwards, wring her hands nervously, and stammer a barely audible response.

Earle was the single exception to this rule, the only other adult she seemed fully at ease with. Of course, having just turned twenty-two, he was a child by comparison to the aged Mary. He often acted like a child, too—a big, irrepressible boy full of puppyish enthusiasm. At the same time, there was a worldliness about him, the air of someone who had already seen and done things that the timorous spinster had never so much as dreamed of, let alone experienced.

The details of their early relationship—how Mary and Earle first came to speak, the course of their friendship, the blossoming of their love—are largely unknown. To the diffident old maid, the young man must have seemed deeply compelling, a fascinating mix of worldly experience and childlike exuberance. Besides, he was clearly a serious individual who was always musing on religious matters and citing Scripture by heart, traits that must certainly have made an impression on the pious Mary.

And there was something else about him that quickly became evident, a raw emotional neediness that brought out powerfully maternal feelings in the elderly woman. Something about the nearly sixty-year-old Mary Martin also stimulated powerful feelings, though of a significantly different nature, in Earle Ferral.

Just a few weeks after they met, Earle broached the subject of marriage. Mary, who had waited her whole life for a proposal, seemed ready to accept. There was, however, an obstacle. She was Irish Catholic; Earle was a Protestant. Always open to varieties of religious experience, he had no objection to a wedding conducted according to the rituals of the Roman Catholic church.

And so on Tuesday, August 5, 1919, at St. Agnes’ Rectory, Mary Teresa Martin married a man young enough to be not just her son but her grandson. And Earle Leonard Ferral took a wizened bride, the first in a string of elderly women
who would become the objects of his increasingly deadly obsession.

The newlyweds rented a few cramped rooms in a dilapidated house on Masonic Avenue and Eighth Street. Sheltered as she was, Mary Fuller understood, of course, that matrimony required patience, even fortitude. After all, the vows she had taken spoke directly of its vicissitudes: “for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” Even so, she wasn’t prepared for life with Earle Leonard Ferrai. Who could have been? As she herself would later testify, in her primly understated way, her brief time with the man she knew as Evan Fuller was a “trying experience.”

His personal habits were an early source of mortification to the fastidious Mary. It quickly became clear that her husband’s standards of hygiene were not much higher than a hobo’s. He rarely bathed, a problem that acquired a special urgency in their claustrophobic living quarters. Mary was immediately cast into the role she would play throughout their marriage, the long-suffering mother to Earle’s feckless son.

One evening, before they were about to go out and visit her family, Mary finally put her foot down and insisted that he bathe. With a relenting shrug, Earle disappeared into the bathroom and emerged moments later carrying a glass of water. Then, seating himself on the edge of their mattress, he removed his shoes and socks and poured the contents of the glass over his feet.

“That is your bath?” Mary exclaimed.

Earle nodded. “My toes are nice and clean. That’s what counts.” With that, he slipped his shoes and socks back on and made ready to leave.

His public behavior also made her squirm with discomfort. Just a few blocks from their house was a down-at-the-heels little eatery called the Blossom Restaurant where the food, if not especially palatable, was plentiful and cheap. For prices ranging from ten cents to two bits, a diner could eat his or her fill of pigs’ feet and kraut, meatballs and beans, oxtail goulash, lamb stew, or Yankee pot roast—coffee, tea, or buttermilk included.

Every now and then, when their finances allowed it, Earle and Mary would treat themselves to dinner at the Blossom. But the experience invariably proved a trial for poor Mary. To begin with, her husband’s diet was highly eccentric. He would take forever to study the menu, then order something like a bowl of stewed prunes or a dish of boiled spinach. Mary (who, in spite of her scrawny physique, could pack away a corned-beef-and-cabbage dinner with gusto) was always disconcerted by Earle’s peculiar choices.

But watching him eat was far worse. Seated with his hat pulled so low on his head that it half-covered his ears, he would raise the dish to his face and consume its contents as though he were feeding at a trough. The patrons of the Blossom weren’t sticklers when it came to etiquette. It was the kind of place where the men shovelled up their black-eyed peas with their knife blades. But at least they ate with utensils. Even in that greasy spoon, Earle’s table manners drew ugly stares.

His freakish fashion sense, unmodified since childhood, was also a source of constant mortification to Mary. He would leave home in the morning dressed in decent clothes, then show up later that day in a completely different outfit, garments so tattered that a tramp would have scorned them. Or he might appear in some outlandish getup, purchased for a pittance from one of the secondhand shops in the Tenderloin—a sailor’s suit, golfing apparel, or the uniform of a Stanford University student. At other times, he would come home in a weird, color-coordinated ensemble, arrayed from head to foot in white or yellow or green.

Like another elderly woman who had been burdened with him—his grandmother, Jennie, who resembled Earle’s new wife in more ways than one—Mary did what she could to keep him presentable. But her efforts were unavailing. Early in their marriage, she used some of her savings, painfully amassed over many years, to buy him a new overcoat. The following day, Earle went off wearing her gift. When he returned that evening, the coat was gone. So were the rest of his clothes, which had been replaced with a suit of rags. He had also managed to lose his underwear, a habit of his since childhood.

The self-abasing Mary did not reproach her husband,
though she never bought him clothing again. She did not even chide him when she came home one evening and discovered that he had removed her best brown-cloth skirt from her trunk, cut it up, and fashioned it into a pair of trousers for himself. Dressed in one of his baggy, thrift-shop shirts and the crudely stitched pants, he looked like a shipwreck survivor. But what use was there in upbraiding him? By then, Mary Fuller had already concluded (as she would later testify) that her husband “was not reponsible for his acts.”

She continued to stick by him in spite of his increasingly bizarre behavior. There were the times when he would spring out of bed, throw on his clothes, and announce that he was going out to look for a job—at three o’clock in the morning. There were his crackpot schemes, undertaken with such intense (if short-lived) zeal—like the tune he put a small deposit on a vacant lot and set about constructing a house, a project he abandoned after erecting a wall approximately one foot high.

Earle, in fact, was always promising Mary a house of their own, a pledge that led to one of the most humiliating experiences of her married life. One Saturday, he suggested that the two of them travel to Oakland to look at houses. They found a real-estate agent who spent several hours showing them some modest cottages outside of town. One of the places struck Earle and Mary as ideal. “This is the one,” Earle declared.

By then, however, the agent had evidently become a little dubious about Earle-a feeling confirmed when he asked if the young man could afford the down payment. Digging a hand into his pants pocket, Earle fished out his entire fund of cash. “Is this enough?” he as1ked, holding out two dollars. Mary thought she would perish from embarrassment.

Even worse, however, was Earle’s jealousy. At first, Mary found it quaint, even endearing. No one had ever felt that way about her before, and it seemed sweet (if slightly odd) to be treated as such a desirable woman at her age.

It wasn’t long, however, before Earle’s possessiveness lost its charm. Mary found it impossible to have anything to do with another human being without sending her husband into a jealous fit. He would berate her if she so much as chatted
with a trolley conductor or stopped a stranger on the street to ask the time. Even her female friends became the objects of his resentment. He would accuse her bitterly of caring more for them than she did about him. It reached the point where Mary was afraid to talk to her own brother in front of Earle.

Mary rarely let herself get angry at her husband. But there was one occasion when his crazy jealousy drove her into a rage.

Among her most cherished possessions was a framed, inscribed photo of Mr. John Dillon, a member of the House of Commons, who was a personal friend of her uncle. Mary had stowed the photograph in her trunk for safekeeping. One day, not long after she and Earle moved into their little place on Masonic, she decided to brighten up the dingy living room by displaying the photo on a shelf. When she opened her trunk, however, she discovered that the frame was empty.

Confused and distressed, she sought out Earle, but he professed ignorance. Not long afterwards, however, while she was getting ready to do the laundry, she emptied his pants pocket and found the photograph, mangled and torn beyond salvaging. When his outraged wife confronted him with the ruined picture, Earle explained that he had thought it a memento from a male admirer and destroyed it in a jealous fit of pique.

In spite of his violent moods, his wild suspicions and angry accusations, Mary never felt threatened by Earle. Not, at any rate, in the beginning of their marriage. There was something so hapless and childlike about him. Children, in fact, were the only human beings he seemed fully at ease with. Whenever she and Earle would visit his aunt, he would spend the whole time playing games with his little cousins—hide-and-seek and ring-a-levio and tag. Even at home he would play silly games. Sometimes, when Mary asked him to perform a simple household chore, he would run off and hide like a mischievous toddler, concealing himself behind the window curtains or squeezing behind the sofa. To Mary, living with Earle often seemed less like marriage than motherhood.

In another way, however, their relationship was all too
much like marriage for her tastes. Though she was willing, up to a point, to submit to Earle’s carnal demands—accepting the whole distasteful business as part of her conjugal duties—she was unprepared for his nightly importunities. On those nights when she rebuffed his advances, he would lie beside her on the mattress and abuse himself repeatedly, forcing her to flee the bedroom in disgust.

There was no respite from his lust. In February 1920, six months after they married, Mary was taken ill and rushed to St. Mary’s Hospital. At first Earle behaved solicitously, visiting daily and bringing her trifles like flowers and candy. His presence, however, quickly became oppressive. He would sit at her bedside hour after hour, staring blankly into space or glowering at her doctor, whom he regarded as a rival for Mary’s affections. The very day she was discharged, Earle brought her home, helped her change into her night-clothes, and put her to bed. Then he climbed in beside her and forced himself on the enfeebled woman.

For the first time, she began to wonder if her brother, Frank, was right. For months, he had been urging her to leave Earle. His sister, he believed, had been driven by her own desperate loneliness into a disastrous union.

Visiting Mary in the hospital one day, Frank found his brother-in-law seated on a chair at her bedside, staring unblinkingly upward. “Hello there, Earle,” Frank said amiably. But if the peculiar young man was aware of the greeting, he gave no indication. He continued to gape at the ceiling, his lips working ceaselessly as he chattered silently to himself. “That fellow is crazy,” Frank whispered to his sister, who simply chewed on her bottom lip and blinked back her tears.

As soon as Mary was discharged, Frank begged her to break off with Earle. Mary, however, was not only a devout Roman Catholic but also, as she put it, an “Irish woman of the old type.” Divorce was out of the question. She had vowed to stick by her husband in sickness as well as in health. And he was sick, mentally sick—the “worst kind of sickness you could have,” she believed.

He became even worse after the accident. Right from the start of their marriage, Earle had been afflicted with savage, recurrent headaches. When they struck, his face became haggard
and pinched, his skin turned ashen white, and his eyes seemed to darken until they looked like two black, fathomless holes. Mary would try to soothe him by applying witch hazel to his brow but nothing seemed to help. One day, while working for a landscape gardener, he fell from the upper branches of a tree and landed on his head. He was admitted to a hospital with a serious concussion but fled after two days, showing up at home with his head so heavily bandaged that his eyes were barely visible beneath the thick turban of gauze.

Afterwards, his headaches grew more frequent. And his behavior became even more erratic. And scarier. More and more often, she would find him sitting silently in the kitchen staring intently at nothing. When she asked what he was doing, he would point wildly at the blank, flaking wall.