The Prettiest Feathers (32 page)

“I don’t know. I don’t ever see him do anything.”

I spoke to Cedric on the stairs one day—just to say hello, to try to get a conversation going.

“You the one hit the kid in the face with the rock,” he said.

I couldn’t escape my own violence.

A short time later, Cedric dove from the roof and landed on the jungle gym in the backyard.

Memory can be a loose commodity. It’s sometimes difficult to know what’s real and what isn’t—what we’re really remembering and what are only dreams. It’s especially
difficult when the others who were around are less than helpful, when they don’t want to remember, or can’t.

Something was wrong in the apartment I knew it the moment I came to the door and couldn’t hear the TV. The knob wouldn’t turn, so I knocked. My sister opened the door and I looked into her eyes
.

“You’re late” she said
.

“What’s wrong?” I wanted to know
.

“We’re going to the zoo.”

“I don’t want to go to the zoo. I want to know what’s wrong.”

“Your father’s sick.”

She always called him “your father” because she had a different father.

“Again?” I asked.

“We have to go to the zoo,” she said, continuing to hold the door in a way that didn’t let me enter or even see inside.

“Where’s Ma?”

“Sleeping. We can go look at the gorilla.”

I thought about that.

“I want to see the gorilla,” I said, “but I don’t want to walk all the way to the zoo.”

“Ma gave me money for the bus. I’ll get my coat.”

She closed the door and left me standing in the hall. In a few minutes she was back, and closed the door behind her, locking it. I watched her put the key in the pocket of her maroon coat, then pull on her black gloves.

She was five years older than I was, and I trusted her. For me, feeling safe was feeling warm, and my sister made me feel warm, even on the coldest winter nights.

“What’s the matter with him this time?” I asked.

“Says it’s his heart again. Ma says he’ll be better later.”

We walked down the stairs to the darkening street.

“Why does he hate me?” I asked.

“He hates everyone.”

“Does he hate you?”

“He doesn’t really know me,” she said
.

“
My father knows me, and he hates me
.”

“I don’t even know if he really is your father” she said. “There was another man before him, but I cant remember his name. Ma wants you to think of him as your father. Maybe he is. I don’t know
.”

I considered that
.

“If he isn’t my father, I don’t know if I could think of him like one
.”

“Maybe that’s why he hates you
.”

“
Does the whiskey hurt his heart
?”

“
I don’t think it’s his heart at all. I think it’s just the whiskey. You haven’t seen him go crazy
.”

“
I can imagine that. I think that’s worse—imagining something instead of knowing it. Maybe I should see it once. Did he hit Ma
?”

“
I don’t think so. I think he just went to sleep after
.”

“
Maybe he won’t wake up,” I said
.

“
Ma says maybe one of these times he’ll wake up dead
.”

“
She talks
.”

It was a short bus ride to Franklin Park. My sister bought me a bag of peanuts at the gate and we walked along the path eating them.

“You want to go to the elephant house first?” she asked. “I just want to see the gorilla.” “Why do you like him so much?”

“I wish he wasn’t in a cage. I wish they took him back to Africa and let him go. He makes me feel happy, though.”

“I’m glad. You don’t seem happy very often.”

“I know,” I said, and held tightly to her hand.

The African lowlands gorilla has fingers as big as bananas, and eats seeds. The one at Franklin Park lived in a small, hexagonal stone building with four barred windows. The enclosure was surrounded by an iron fence.

His cage was empty. The bars on the window were broken, twisted out of shape. I found out later that kids were throwing beer bottles at him, and that the last two had been filled with
gasoline and stuffed with rags. The boys lit the rags, then threw the bottles into the cage where they exploded
.

The gorilla went wild, broke free of the enclosure, and had to be shot by the police. They left the cage like that—the twisted bars, the blackened walls
.

So many times I had wanted the gorilla to crash out of there, but not that way. Later I would dream about what happened to him. I would hear the wailing, the roaring. I would understand his terror, feel his horror. His rage lived inside me
.

Our beasts can never be set totally free. They may have brief periods of freedom, but then must be restrained or put to death. The rage of beasts should not be led by the hand into vacant lots of kite-flying children—places where chaos and collision are all too likely to occur.

I opened my eyes. Through the sliding glass door in the motel room I could see the determined march of cows toward a distant barn. They were Holsteins mostly—a few Brown Swiss. The black-and-white slab sides of the Holsteins swayed as they walked. The brown heifers seemed not much larger than the white-tailed deer being hunted all over the state. Cows, too, have deep, sad eyes.

Everything in my life had been like that dream of the train that just kept going faster. There was never any way to stop it once it got going. It had a life of its own.

The rock had hit the kid square in the face. There were screams and blood. I knew if I ever yielded to my own terror, I would go crazy with rage. Yet I knew I had to tease it—feel it from time to time, reassure myself that it was still there. I had to reach inside and stroke the soft fur of the African lowlands gorilla within me.

Shortly before he died, my father scraped together enough money to move the family from Roxbury to the suburbs because he didn’t want my sister dating black boys. Had he lived, he would have seen her marry a nice white boy. And he would have seen me select a wife from the race that frightened him so.

I worked my way through school as a cook in a Jewish delicatessen. I made the brisket and the pastrami, the salads and the deserts—and, occasionally, filled in for someone at the sandwich counter. I was making sandwiches that night when Savvy came in for a roast beef on rye.

I liked her sense of humor. She was bright, attractive, assertive, independent—but I think what I loved most about Savvy was her willing vulnerability, her belief in the goodness of others. I also envied that feeling she had of truly belonging in this world. But I, ever the outsider, remained the hardened cynic, trusting no one except her. She said she could change me, and, for a long while, I believed—perhaps even hoped—that she would.

I pushed myself up from my chair and retrieved the material that Street had faxed just before I left Michigan. It was a summary of a case presented as a problem in ethics. The issues raised by the case were later resolved in California’s Tarasoff decision—that a therapist had a duty to inform when a client made an explicit threat against someone. At the time of the Paul Wolf case, the waters were still muddy.

Wolf, a ward of the state after assaulting his stepfather and mother with a knife, was seen in therapy by a licensed clinical social worker. The youth told his therapist that if he were returned to his family, “I’ll probably kill them all.”

In the course of treatment he stated his intention to kill other people—a teacher, the wife of a police officer, a neighbor. He went into considerable detail about how he would commit these murders.

One of the three women was found murdered in the precise manner that Wolf had told the therapist he would kill her. A mail carrier on her way to work described a young man she had seen leaving the victim’s yard just before dawn. She picked Wolf out of a photo lineup, making him the prime suspect.

In the judgment of the therapist, the confidentiality
required by her profession, as well as that imposed by the state on matters related to minors in their custody, were sacrosanct Besides, she argued, Wolf was in a residential school with twenty-four-hour supervision.

According to students at the school, however, the young man came and went pretty much as he pleased. Most of his forays away from the campus were at night, and he was never caught. Predictably, school officials insisted that any talk of his coming and going as he wished was fabrication. They didn’t say it was impossible; just highly unlikely.

The police investigation produced nothing. The homicide remained on the books as unsolved.

Police theorized that the victim, Estelle Cummings, fifty-three, had been asleep in her bed when an intruder entered her home. The time of death was estimated as between 2:00 and 5:00
A.M.
The presence of defensive wounds on the corpse suggested a struggle. The killer awakened her before he started plunging his knife into her. He stabbed her thirty-one times.

Wolf’s second intended victim didn’t die as he had promised she would. She committed suicide—hanged herself—six months after Cummings’s murder. She left a note saying that she hadn’t been able to sleep. She expected “him” to come in the night.

The third was married to a police officer, and it seemed as though Wolf had more sense than to try anything there.

I phoned the officer’s department and learned that Captain Bruce Richards had been retired for a couple of years. He and his wife were living in Oakland Park, Florida. I got the number from information and called.

Bruce Richards was friendly enough, but understandably wary when I explained the reason for my call. I offered to provide him with law enforcement references before we talked, but the offer alone was enough to satisfy him.

“Paul didn’t leave us alone,” he said. “When I was out on calls, somebody was prowling around the house. A couple of
times I found footprints. I also found jimmy marks on the back door. I went down to that school of his and had a private conversation with him. I told him if there was ever so much as another toe print outside my house that shouldn’t be there—I didn’t care if it was his or not—I was coming back to kill him. That was the end of the trouble. He knew I meant it.”

“Did you ever talk to him after that? Your impressions of him would help me a great deal.”

“I never talked to the bastard again. I saw him around town a few times. He was down in the city for a while, I guess, but he showed up back home now and then. Then the army took him. Why you digging all this up now?”

“I think Paul Wolf is still alive, and I believe he may be responsible for other murders.”

Richards laughed. “I know he’s alive. I saw him. That bullshit about his ashes—well, it wasn’t my problem anymore. We were up visiting family and friends last summer. I’ve got a Winnebago and we drove that up—stayed in a campground near Quechee. I saw this guy getting into a pickup truck that had the name of some construction company on the door. I felt like I knew him—even walked over closer for a better look. He drove off, but I got the plate number. I forgot all about it until one day it just hit me. You know the way that works. I thought, ‘That was Paul Wolf.’ He looked his age—in his forties, I guess—but he was still in good shape. It was the eyes that gave him away. When I was working, I always called that kind ‘nobody’s home eyes.’”

“Did you ever check the plate?”

“Sure. Daedalus Construction. I checked on ’em. Legitimate outfit. Successful. They had kind of an absentee owner. Sometimes he was there, most of the time he wasn’t. I figured maybe that was Paul—that he just wanted to start his life again, you know?—with a clean slate? Guess I was wrong.”

Daedalus—the architect who designed a maze for the king
of Crete to imprison the Minotaur, a monster that was part bull and part man—was the father of Icarus. He designed the wings of wax for his son to use to escape from the maze and the beast, but Icarus flew too near the sun and his wings melted. He plunged into the sea
.

I thanked Richards and got off the phone. Then I cracked open the yellow pages. Daedalus Construction.

Luck.

I hoisted my feet back onto the table and allowed my eyes to close.

For many years I supervised the training of young psychologists. Always, in the first session, I raised the question of power in the therapeutic relationship. I never had a trainee who was totally comfortable with that concept—that they have power and wield it, whether they realize it or not. Their clients give it to them, take it away, engage them in battles over it.

These young zealots always wanted to rush into the clinical world and start curing everyone in sight. They were well meaning, but blind. They were humanists. They were noble. They cared, and they knew how to communicate that. Graduate school had taught them all the necessary techniques.

The power to heal is the flip side of the power to destroy
.

I always told them that. They grimaced. Some of them requested, and were granted, other supervisors. The ones who recognized the truth about power were the ones who went on to become superior therapists.

I started drifting again.

Luck
.

The power to destroy
.

The need to remember and to embrace our own horror
.

I see myself hurling a rock into a child’s face because I am frightened. My sister has gone away. I’m alone. He’s careening toward me, totally out of control
.

A man reminds me of what I have done, then dives to his death from the roof. Was I so evil?

I feel something stir inside me
.

When abreaction occurs in the course of therapy, it is spontaneous. The client reexperiences a trauma, along with all the horrible feelings associated with it. It’s as if it’s happening right at that moment—there’s that kind of immediacy, that level of intensity. But, because the environment is supportive and caring, the client won’t be lost in the maelstrom. Healing can begin.