My mother, were she living, would wish me to increase the number to three. “God loves you, Margaret,” she whispered to me as a child each night at bedtime. Mother's favorite Bible passage was Psalm 103, a chapter that I had memorized in its entirety by the time I was six years old and that we frequently quoted together after supper in the evenings. When Mother died and left me alone, however, I grew to hate the words of the psalm, for I felt they mocked me and made light of the misery into which I was so suddenly pitched. Oftentimes in the deep of night at my grandfather's house, phrases from the passage would come to me, and I would rail against them.
“Forget not all his benefits! Who redeemeth thy life from destruction! Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things! So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's! The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all who are oppressed! For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him! Bless the Lord, O my soul!”
I pulled the bedclothes over my head as I spat out the words and pronounced them lies.
At nighttime during those black years there festered within me a deep resentment toward my mother for having taught me such untruths and for having abandoned me. How could she have schooled me in empty promises, I reasoned, if she truly loved me? How could she have presented the canards of the Bible as facts? How could she have died and left me defenseless? At a level beyond my anger, however, I knew that she had loved me past all telling, and in the daytime I knew that she would have died to protect me, though ironically, it was her dying that left me vulnerable.
Concerning the Bible, many of its words are firmly rooted in my mind. Though I reject their message, I nevertheless value them for their style. I often borrow phrases from this trove of biblical language, at times unwittingly. For instance, I had completed three chapters of the manuscript that I am presently writing when I realized that the titles I had chosen for all three were phrases from various books of the BibleâMatthew, Galatians, and Proverbs, to name them specifically. The idea appealed to me as a unifying device, and I purposed to continue selecting chapter titles from the Bible. Concerning chapter titles in general, I have noted in recent years their regrettable absence in contemporary works. I suppose some editors may consider them to be an inessential, perhaps even adolescent, heralding of the material to come.
Nota Bene
: It is my wish, however, should my manuscript ever make its way to a professional editor, that the chapter titles be retained.
I must delay the advancement of my story no longer. Before I had reached my twentieth birthday, as I said, I had known love twice. My first love, of course, was that of my mother. This was a mutual love, both received and given in unstinting abundance.
Now for the second. The previous chapter, in which I reported Birdie's conduct during the shameful ordeal imposed upon the American public by Susan Smith, segues quite smoothly into the revelation that I am now at last ready to make known, for both include mother, child, and death by water.
I will state it now. Besides the love of a child for her mother, I have also known the love of a mother for her child. When I was eighteen years of age, I gave birth to a baby. Not having spoken of this in many years, I feel a shortness of breath; I smell the musty scent of fear; I hear the scrabbling of demons and the moaning of ghosts; I see the eerie flickering of uncertain lights as I enter the haunted house of my memories.
I was terrified for many reasons upon discovering that I was with child. Imagine yourself, if you will, as a girl of seventeen, utterly devoid of friendships with peers, teachers, neighbors, or relatives. Though required to attend church with oppressive regularity in the company of my grandparents and to present myself at various functions of the young people, I did not mingle well. The youth leader, an overeager man by the name of Lester Kirby, with the soft pink features of a toddler, told my grandparents that I seemed to intimidate the others with my standoffish attitude. I detested the church, I suspect, because of its high esteem of my grandfather, who was the elder in charge of financial disbursements. I viewed it as an altogether ignoble institution because of its failure to see and judge him for what he was.
At school I was shunned by teachers and fellow students alike, largely because of my supercilious manner toward the inferior instruction being passed off as education, but partly, I know now, because I had no idea how to go about making friends. I told myself that I did not
need
friends, but I would have given all that I had, including my considerable intellectâperhaps
especially
my intellectâto have had a single true friend to claim as my own. I often read of friendships, of course, and they seemed to me an exceedingly precious but elusive possession. I suppose my only friends were my books.
I was terrified, then, because I had no ally in my trouble, and I knew for a certainty that I had fallen headlong into trouble. I had learned by now that my grandmother was merely an extension of my grandfather, not as actively evil, but let us say willfully and adamantly ignorant. As a girl of thirteen, I had attempted one day to stammer out the truth to her about my grandfather's offenses toward me, only to have her pummel my ears soundly and at great length and then order me never again to open my foul lips against “such a man of God,” as she called him.
She went on to impress upon me the debt of gratitude that I had accrued. “Your grandfather took me and your mother in when we didn't have hardly a shoestring between us,” she said. “And he never once complained about having to support a child that wasn't his ownânot once! And he didn't blame me, not ever, not a single time, for not being able to bear him any children to carry on his bloodline. He's a
Christian
, Margaret! You know that! Ask anybody! He's never once darkened the door of a saloon or so much as lit a cigarette! And here you are trying to soil his good name. You're a wretched child, Margaret, stubborn just like your mother. She broke your grandfather's heart when she sneaked away from home against his will, and I wouldn't have blamed him a bit if he'd refused to take you in when they tracked us down after the accident.”
“I wish that he had refused,” I whispered, and she struck me again.
“You don't deserve the good home we've given you!” she cried. “When they called us after the accident, your grandfather never even hesitated for a minute to think about taking you in! He welcomed you like you were his own flesh and blood. You better just fix whatever's wrong with you to make you so mean and ungrateful, Margaret. I won't have you spreading lies. Not one person would believe a little castoff like you anyway. You'd be taken away and locked up for libel and slander!”
The speech went on in this vein for some ten or fifteen minutes, after which my grandmother ordered me to the bathroom, where she placed in my palm a bar of soap and instructed me to “wash out your filthy mouth.” She stood by grimly to oversee the procedure, and as I choked and frothed, she commanded that I rinse and repeat the process.
The only person at Latham County High who smiled at me upon occasion was Mr. Wadworth, my chemistry teacher. He was the only teacher, I might add, whose knowledge of his subject seemed to me sufficiently thorough to be beyond challenge. Perhaps I could have gone to Mr. Wadworth had I known how to initiate a conversation in anything other than a confrontational manner, but even then there existed the inalterable difficulty of his being a man. How did I know whether he could be trusted? In 1961 teen pregnancy was not the common occurrence of today. And one certainly did not confide in a male teacher concerning such a delicate matter. Yet I have often wondered how he would have responded.
After realizing with an appalling shock that I was carrying a child, I endured a dayâNovember 7, 1961âthat I shall always equate with the word
panic
. I cringed to imagine the response of my grandparents upon learning of my condition. I could anticipate only two courses of action that they might take, and I could bear the thought of neither. Perhaps they would seek to terminate my pregnancy, after which time my life would resume as it had been, save perhaps for a more scrupulous monthly record keeping on my grandfather's part. As I had an indescribable phobia of medical procedures and had read frightening stories of the particular procedure required to destroy a fetus, I was terrified of this possibility. Or perhaps my grandparents would choose for me to bear the child. If so, I was certain that they would portray me to the community as a promiscuous rebel to whom they continued, in their great kindness and unrequited charity, to offer refuge and material aid. Were I to identify the father of the child, no one would believe me. If I did not, I would become the object of scorn and eventually pity as, Hester Prynne-like, I would bear my shame alone.
The reader of today must wish to ask me this: “Why did you stay in a place where you were so grossly and repeatedly mistreated?” In today's society of public assistance for abused women and children, of shelters for runaways, of hot lines for unwed mothers, it is perhaps easy to forget that these provisions were not available to the same degree some thirty or forty years ago.
Besides, I had no place to go. My grandparents had left their home in West Falls, Oregon, in 1925, a month after my grandfather had so mercifully taken to his bosom my grandmother and her four-year-old daughterâmy motherâand had traveled by train to Marshland, New York, where they had settled, my grandfather having secured a position with a company that manufactured elevators. They had no relatives except those in Oregon, with whom they never corresponded and of whom I never heard them speak. When I asked my grandmother about her parents one day, I recall a clearly discernible cloud descending upon her spirit as she said faintly, “Oh, Margaret, all that was so long ago.”
As for returning to one of the cities where I myself had lived as a child and trying to establish contact with a sympathetic acquaintance, this prospect appeared hopeless. I had, in fact, once written a letter to the motherly Mrs. Gault, my former neighbor in Ohio, but had never received an answer. Whether my grandfather intercepted the letter, I do not know, though I suspect this to be true. Or perhaps Mrs. Gault had moved by then, or my letter was misdirected by the postal service. Perhaps the missive, in which my pleas for rescue were polite though quite direct, is even today wedged under the rubber conveyor belt of an antiquated letter sorter in some distant city.
I suppose my story gives testimony to the sense of total entrapment that one feels in an incestuous home, for in spite of my superior academic prowess, I had never seen fleeing my grandparents' home as an option until November 8, 1961, at the age of seventeen years and five months. After the previous day of mad reckoning, however, my panic subsided and my course became plain. All at once I saw that I
must
flee. I suppose I do not fit the profile of the typical victim of incest, for what must become for many the nadir of disgraceâthat is, the bearing of a child as a result of the sinâwas for me the redeeming of my life from destruction, promised (but heretofore undelivered) in Psalm 103, of which I spoke earlier.
For two days after my decision to leave my grandfather's house, I feigned illness, both to employ my time during the day in the laying of my plans and to keep my grandfather from my bed at night. I had tried the pretense of various maladies many times before, but to no avail. Either my grandfather did not care that he might be causing me additional discomfort as well as exposing himself to illness, or he saw through my deception. This time, however, I threw off all inhibitions and staged a drama that was persuasive enough to drive him from my room.
Let me hasten to the conclusion of this chapter. What is yet to come is horrible to remember but essential to the revelation of my history, which impinges upon the larger story I am telling, that of Birdie Freeman. I will not recount the details of my departure and flight from Marshland, New York, but I came at last by an elaborately circuitous route to the city of Evansville, Indiana. I had chosen Evansville for its size. It was not so small as to invite close inspection by snooping neighbors, I reasoned, nor so large as to be the typical hiding place for a runaway and the target of police investigations in the event that a search for me were conducted.
By the age of seventeen, though slender as a birch withe, I had grown to a height of five feet nine inches. My grandfather, however, stood six inches taller than I and, although decidedly corpulent, was massively powerful even in his sixties. My facial features, though fair in the sense of classical symmetry, were customarily drawn down into lines of despondency and rage, my hatred being directed not only at my grandfather and the church but also, more aggressively, toward myself for my powerlessness; therefore, my youth was, I believe, well concealed. Binding and pinning my thick dark curls, I donned a scarfâthat most naive of disguisesâand thus passed for an adult woman.
My life for the following eight months is shameful to recall, for it was of necessity characterized by deceit. Having stolen from my grandparents the sum of three hundred dollars, I rented a single room in a boardinghouse along the Ohio River in Evansville, Indiana. By day I found honest though menial work, which provided an adequate income for my few needs. By night I read, having located a public library even before I sought lodging, and listened to radio programs on the old box radio I had brought with me. Thus I regressed to the solitary life I had known as a child during my mother's daytime absences. For some time I called myself by mother's and father's middle names: Paula Andrew.
Whether my grandparents cried an alarm or attempted to trace my whereabouts following my departure, I never discovered. Pictures of missing children did not appear on milk cartons in 1961. Perhaps my grandfather sensed the risk of scandal if he set the law on my heels. Perhaps he thought after my years of silence that I would suddenly and publicly unburden myself of evidence too convincing to be dismissed.