Sourland (3 page)

It was then that Anton began to confide in Hadley, in a lowered and agitated voice: the head of his laboratory at the Institute had cheated him—he'd taken discoveries of Anton Kruppe to claim for his own—he'd published a paper in which Anton was cited merely in a list of graduate assistants—and now, when Anton protested, he was exiling Anton from the lab—he refused to speak to Anton at the Institute and had banished him and so Anton had gone to the university president—demanding to be allowed to speak to the president but of course he'd been turned away—came back next morning hoping to speak with the president and when he was told no, demanding then to speak with the provost—and the university attorney—their offices were near-together in the administration building—all of them were in conspiracy together, with the head of the Institute and the head of Anton's laboratory—he knew this!—of course, he was not such a fool, to not know this—he'd become excited and someone called security—campus police arrived and led Anton away protesting—they had threatened to turn him over to township police—to be arrested for “trespassing”—“threatening bodily harm”—Anton had been terrified he'd be deported by Homeland Security—he had not yet an American citizenship—

“You are smiling, Hedley? What is the joke?”

Smiling? During this long breathless disjointed speech Hadley had been staring at Anton Kruppe in astonishment.

“It is amusing to you—yes? That all my work, my effort—I am most hardworking in the lab, our supervisor exploits my good nature—he
was always saying ‘Anton is the
stoic
among us'—what this means, this flattery of Americans, is how you can be used. To be
used
—that is our purpose, to the Institute. But you must not indicate, that you are
in the know.
” Anton spoke like one whose grievances are so much in excess of his ability to express them, he might have been the bearer of an ancient, racial burden. “And now—after three years—when my findings are cheated from me and I am of no more use—it is time to toss away into the ‘Dumpster'—that is good word, good joke, eh?—‘Dumpster'—very good American joke—the Institute is saying my contract will not be renewed, for the federal grant is ended. And my supervisor had not ever gotten around to aiding me with my citizenship application, years it has been, of course I have been dialtory myself—I have been working
so hard
in the lab—yesterday morning it was, the decision came to me by e-mail…You—you must not smile, Hedley! That is very—selfish. That is very selfish and very cruel.”

The indignant man loomed over Hadley. His angular face wasn't so soft now but hardened with strain. His jaws were clenched like muscles. The trowel-shaped triangle of hair at his hairline was more pronounced and a sweaty-garbagey smell wafted from his heated body. Behind the smudged schoolboy lenses his eyes were deep-socketed, wary. Hadley said nervously, “Maybe you should leave, Anton. I'm expecting friends. I mean…they're stopping by, to take me with them. To dinner in town…”

Hadley didn't want her agitated visitor to sense how frightened she was of him. Her mistake was in turning away to lead him to the door. Insulting him. His arm looped around her neck, in an instant they were struggling off balance, he caught at her, and kissed her—kissed and bit at her lips, like a suddenly ravenous rodent—both their wineglasses went flying, clattering to the floor—“You like this, Hedley! This, you want. For this, you asked me.”

He overcame her. She was fighting him, whimpering and trying to scream, trying to draw breath to scream but he'd pushed her down, horribly she was on the floor, pushed down helpless and panicked on the
floor of her own house, in terror thinking that Anton was trying to strangle her, then it seemed that he was kissing her, or trying to—in panic she jammed her elbows into his chest, his ribs—his mouth came over hers again—his mouth was wet and ravenous and his teeth closed over her lip, in terror she thought that he would bite off her lip, in a kind of manic elation he was murmuring what sounded like
You like me! You want this!
Grunting with effort he straddled her, his face was flushed with emotion, fury; he brought his knee up between her legs, roughly; their struggle had become purely physical, and desperate, enacted now in near-silence except for their panting breaths. Hadley had no idea what she was doing moving her head from side to side trying to avoid the man's mouth, his sharp yellow teeth, the smell of his agitated breath, the mouth was like that of a great sea leech sucking at her, sucking at her tongue, the back of her head was being struck against the hardwood floor
Oh!—oh—oh
as if he wanted to crack her skull, his fingers were poking and jabbing at her between her legs, in a paroxysm of desperation Hadley managed to squirm out from beneath him, like a panicked animal crawling on hands and knees and almost in that instant she believed that she might escape Anton Kruppe except he had only to lunge after her, seize her ankle in his strong fingers, laughing and climbing over her straddling her again more forcibly this time closing his fingers around her neck so now she knew she could not escape, she knew it was certain, she would die. In a choked voice Anton was saying, “You—want me here! You asked for this. You have no right to laugh at me. You and your ‘trustee' husband…” In the confusion of the moment Hadley had no idea what Anton was saying. Trustee? Her husband had served on an advisory board for the history department at the university, he'd had no association with the molecular biology institute. She could not have explained this, she had not the strength, or the breath; she felt her assailant's fingers now poking inside her, she cried out in pain and kicked at him squirming beneath him like a creature desperate to escape a predator yet she had time to think almost calmly
This can't be happening. This is wrong.
She seemed to see herself in that
instant with a strange stillness and detachment as frequently through her marriage when she'd lain with her husband and made love with her husband and her mind had slipped free and all that was physical, visceral, immediate and not-to-be-halted happening to her was at a little distance, though now tasting the wine on Anton's tongue, the dark-sour-feral wine taste of a man's mouth like her own, he'd lost patience now and was jamming at her with two fingers, three fingers forced up inside the soft flesh between her legs which Hadley knew was loathed by the man, he was furious with her there, disgusted with her there, his hatred was pure and fiery for her there as she begged him
Please don't hurt me Anton, I want to be your friend Anton I will help you.
It wasn't wine she was tasting but blood—he'd bitten her upper lip—on his feet now looming over her—his work-trousers unzipped, disheveled—his shirt loose, blood-splattered—he'd managed to get to his feet disengaging himself from her—their tangle of limbs, torn clothing, tears, saliva—he staggered away to the front door—stiff-legged as a scarecrow come partway to life—and was gone.

She lay very still. Where he'd left her, she lay with a pounding heart, bathed in sweat and the smell of him, her brain stuck blank, oblivious of her surroundings until after several minutes—it may have been as many as ten or fifteen minutes—she realized that she was alone. It had not quite happened to her as she'd believed it would happen, the
crossing-over.

She managed to get to her feet. She was dazed, sobbing. Some time was required, that she could stand without swaying. Leaning against a chair in the hall, touching the walls. In the opened doorway she stood, staring outside. The front walk was dimly illuminated by a crescent moon overhead. Here was a meager light, a near-to-fading light. She saw that the pumpkin-head had fallen from the step, or had been kicked. On its side it was revealed to be part-shattered, you could see that the back of the cranium was missing. Brains had been scooped out but negligently so that seeds remained, bits of pumpkin-gristle. She stepped outside. Her clothing was torn. Her clothing that was both expensive
and tasteful had been torn and was splattered with blood. She wiped at her mouth, that was bleeding. She would run back into the house, she would dial 911. She would report an assault. She would summon help. For badly she required help, she knew that Anton Kruppe would return. Certainly he would return. On the front walk she stood staring toward the road. What she could see of the road in the darkness. On the roadway there were headlights. An unmoving vehicle. It was very dark, a winter-dark had come upon them. She called out, “Hello? Hello? Who is it?” Headlights on the roadway, where his vehicle was parked.

F
our years old she'd begun to hear in fragments and patches like handfuls of torn clouds the story of the stabbing in Manhattan that was initially her mother's story.

That morning in March 1980 when Mrs. Karr drove to New York City alone. Took the New Jersey Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel exit, entered lower Manhattan and crossed Hudson and Greenwich Streets and at West Street turned north, her usual route when she visited an aunt who lived in a fortress-like building resembling a granite pueblo dwelling on West Twenty-seventh Street—but just below Fourteenth Street traffic began abruptly to slow—the right lane was blocked by construction—a din of air hammers assailed her ears—vehicles were moving in spasmodic jerks—Madeleine braked her 1974 Volvo narrowly avoiding rear-ending a van braking to a stop directly in front of
her—a tin-colored vehicle with a corroded rear bumper and a New York license plate whose raised numerals and letters were just barely discernible through layers of dried mud like a palimpsest. Overhead were clouds like wadded tissues, a sepia glaze to the late-winter urban air and a stink of diesel exhaust and Madeleine Karr whose claim it was that she loved Manhattan felt now a distinct unease in stalled traffic amid a cacophony of horns, the masculine aggressiveness of horns, for several blocks she'd been aware of the tin-colored van jolting ahead of her on West Street, passing on the right, switching lanes, braking at the construction blockade but at once lurching forward as if the driver had carelessly—or deliberately—lifted his foot from the brake pedal and in so doing caused his right front fender to brush against a pedestrian in a windbreaker crossing West Street—crossing at the intersection though at a red light, since traffic was stalled—unwisely then in a fit of temper the pedestrian in the windbreaker struck the fender with the flat of his hand—he was a burly man of above average height—Madeleine heard him shouting but not the words, distinctly—might've been
Fuck you!
or even
Fuck you asshole!
—immediately then the van driver leapt out of the van and rushed at the pedestrian—Madeleine blinked in astonishment at this display of masculine contention—Madeleine was expecting to see the men fight together clumsily—aghast then to see the van driver wielding what appeared to be a knife with a considerable blade, maybe six—eight—inches long—so quickly this was happening, Madeleine's brain could not have identified
Knife!
—trapped behind the steering wheel of the Volvo like a child trapped in a nightmare Madeleine witnessed an event, an action, to which her dazzled brain could not readily have identified as
Stabbing! Murder!
—in a rage the man with the knife lashed at the now stunned pedestrian in the windbreaker, who hadn't time to turn away—striking the man on his uplifted arms, striking and tearing the sleeves of the windbreaker, swiping against the man's face, then in a wicked and seemingly practiced pendulum motion slashing the man's throat just below his jaw, right to left, left to right causing blood to spring instantaneously into the air—
A six-foot arc of
blood at least
as Madeleine would describe it afterward, horrified—
even as the bleeding man kept walking, staggering forward
. Never had Madeleine Karr witnessed anything so horrible—never would Madeleine Karr forget this savage attack in the unsparing clarity of a morning in late March—the spectacle of a living man
attacked, stabbed, throat slashed
before her eyes and what was most astonishing
He kept walking—trying to walk—until he fell
. The victim wore what appeared to be work clothes—work-boots—he was at least a decade older than his assailant—late thirties, early forties—bare-headed, with steely-gray hair in a crew cut—only seconds before the attack Madeleine had seen the victim visibly seething with indignation—empowered by rage—the sort of rough-hewn man with whom, alone in the city in such circumstances on West Street just below Fourteenth Street, Madeleine Karr would never have dared to lock eyes. Yet now the burly man in the windbreaker was rendered harmless—stricken—sinking to his knees as his assailant leapt back from him—dancer-like, very quick on his feet—though not quick enough (Madeleine had to suppose) to avoid being splattered by his victim's blood.
Fucker! Moth'fukr!
—the van driver mouthed words Madeleine couldn't hear but comprehended. In the righteousness of his fury the driver made no attempt to hide the bloody knife in his hand—in fact he appeared to be brandishing the knife—ran back to his vehicle, climbed inside and slammed shut the door and in virtually the same instant propelled the van forward head-on and lurching—Madeleine heard the protesting shriek of rubber tires against pavement—reckless now the fleeing man aimed the van into a narrow space between another vehicle and the torn-up roadway where construction workers in safety helmets had ceased work to stare—knocking aside a sawhorse, a series of orange traffic cones scattering in the street and bouncing off other vehicles as in a luridly colorful and comic simulation of bowling pins scattered by an immense bowling ball; by this time the stricken man was kneeling on the pavement desperately pressing both hands—these were bare hands, Madeleine could see from a distance of no more than twelve feet—against his ravaged throat in a gesture of childlike poi-
gnancy and futility as blood continued to spurt from him
Like water from a hose—horrible!

In a paralysis of horror Madeleine observed the stricken man now fallen—writhing on the pavement in a bright neon-red pool—still clutching desperately at his throat, as if the pressure of his hands could staunch that powerful jet-stream—vaguely Madeleine was becoming aware of a frantic din of horns—traffic was backed up for blocks on northbound West Street as in a nightmare of mangled and thwarted movement like snarled film.
Help me! help me out of here!
—nothing so mattered to Madeleine Karr as escaping from this nightmare—she was thinking not of the stricken man a short distance from the front bumper of the Volvo—not of his suffering, his terror, his imminent death—she was thinking solely of herself—in raw animal panic yearning only to turn her car around—turn her damned car around, somehow—reverse her course on accursed West Street back to the Holland Tunnel and out of New York City—to the Jersey Turnpike—and so to Princeton from which scarcely ninety minutes before she'd left with such exhilaration, childlike anticipation and defiance
Manhattan is so alive!—Princeton is so embalmed. Nothing ever feels real to me here, this life in disguise as a wife and a mother of no more durability than a figure in papier-mâché. I don't need any of you!

But that was ninety minutes before. Driving along leafy Harrison Street over the picture-book canal to Route 1 north in blustery skidding patches of winter sunshine.

Through a constricting tunnel—as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope—Madeleine became aware of other people—other pedestrians cautiously approaching the dying man—workmen from the construction site—a young patrolman on the run—a second patrolman—there came then a deafening siren—sirens—emergency vehicles approached on a side-street peripheral to Madeleine's vision—now there were figures bent over the fallen man—the fallen man was lifted onto a stretcher, carried away—until at last there was nothing to see but a pool of something brightly red like old-fashioned Technicolor
glistening on the pavement in cold March sunshine.
And the nightmare didn't end. The police questioned all the witnesses they could find. They came for me, they took me to the police precinct. For forty minutes they kept me. I had to beg them, to let me use the women's room—I couldn't stop crying—I am not a hysterical person but I couldn't stop crying—of course I wanted to help the police but I couldn't seem to remember what anything had looked like—what the men had looked like—even the “skin color” of the man with the knife—even of the man who'd been stabbed. I told them that I thought the van driver had been dark-skinned—maybe—he was “young”—in his twenties possibly—or maybe older—but not much older—he was wearing a satin kind of jacket like a sports jacket like high school boys wear—I think that's what I saw—I couldn't remember the color of the jacket—maybe it was dark—dark purple?—a kind of shiny material—a cheap shiny material—maybe there was some sort of design on the back of the jacket—Oh I couldn't even remember the color of the van—it was as if my eyes had gone blind—the colors of things had drained from them—I'd seen everything through a tunnel—I thought that the van driver with the knife was dark-skinned but not “black” exactly—but not white—I mean not “Caucasian”—because his hair was—wasn't—his hair didn't seem to be—“Negroid hair”—if that is a way of describing it. And how tall he was, how heavy, the police were asking, I had no idea, I wasn't myself, I was very upset, trying to speak calmly and not hysterically, I have never been hysterical in my life. Because I wanted to help the police find the man with the knife. But I could not describe the van, either. I could not identify the van by its make, or by the year. Of course I could not remember anything of the license plate—I wasn't sure that I'd even seen a license plate—or if I did, it was covered with dirt. The police kept asking me what the men had said to each other, what the pedestrian had said, they kept asking me to describe how he'd hit the fender of the van, and the van driver—the man with the knife—what had he said?—but I couldn't hear—my car windows were up, tight—I couldn't hear. They asked me how long the “altercation” had lasted before the pedestrian was stabbed and I said that the stabbing began right away—then I said maybe it had begun right away—I couldn't be sure—I couldn't be sure of anything—I was hesitant to give a statement—sign my name to a statement—it was as if part of my brain had
been extinguished—trying to think of it now, I can't—not clearly—I was trying to explain—apologize—I told them that I was sorry I couldn't help them better, I hoped that other witnesses could help them better and finally they released me—they were disgusted with me, I think—I didn't blame them—I was feeling weak and sick but all I wanted to do was get back to Princeton, didn't even telephone anyone just returned to the Holland Tunnel thinking I would never use that tunnel again, never drive on West Street not ever again.

 

In that late winter of 1980 when Rhonda was four years old the story of the stabbing began to be told in the Karr household on Broadmead Road, Princeton, New Jersey. Many times the story was told and retold but never in the presence of the Karrs' daughter who was too young and too sensitive for such a terrifying and ugly story and what was worse, a story that seemed to be missing an ending.
Did the stabbed man die?—he must have died. Was the killer caught?—he must have been caught.
Rhonda could not ask because Rhonda was supposed not to know what had happened, or almost happened, to Mommy on that day in Manhattan when she'd driven in alone as Daddy did not like Mommy to do. Nothing is more evident to a child of even ordinary curiosity and canniness than a family secret, a “taboo” subject—and Rhonda was not an ordinary child. There she stood barefoot in her nightie in the hall outside her parents' bedroom where the door was shut against her daring to listen to her parents' lowered, urgent voices inside; silently she came up behind her distraught-sounding mother as Madeleine sat on the edge of a chair in the kitchen speaking on the phone as so frequently Madeleine spoke on the phone with her wide circle of friends.
The most horrible thing! A nightmare! It happened so quickly and there was nothing anyone could do and afterward…
Glancing around to see Rhonda in the doorway, startled and murmuring
Sorry! No more right now, my daughter is listening.

Futile to inquire what Mommy was talking about, Rhonda knew. What had happened that was so upsetting and so ugly that when Rhonda pouted wanting to know she was told
Mommy wasn't hurt, Mommy is all right—that's all that matters.

And
Not fit for the ears of a sweet little girl like you. No no!

Very soon after Mrs. Karr began to tell the story of the stabbing on a Manhattan street, Mr. Karr began to tell the story too. Except in Mr. Karr's excitable voice the story of the stabbing was considerably altered for Rhonda's father was not faltering or hesitant like Rhonda's mother but a professor of American studies at the University, a man for whom speech was a sort of instrument, or weapon, to be boldly and not meekly brandished; and so when Mr. Karr appropriated his wife's story it was in a zestful storytelling voice like a TV voice—in fact, Professor Gerald Karr was frequently seen on TV—PBS, Channel 13 in New York City—discussing political issues—bewhiskered, with glinting wire-rimmed glasses and a ruddy flushed face.
Crude racial justice! Counter-lynching!

Not the horror of the incident was emphasized, in Mr. Karr's telling, but the irony. For the victim, in Mr. Karr's version of the stabbing, was a
Caucasian male
and the delivery-van assailant was a
black male
—or, variously, a
person of color
. Rhonda seemed to know that
Caucasian
meant
white
, though she had no idea why; she had not heard her mother identify
Caucasian, person of color
in her accounts of the stabbing for Mrs. Karr dwelt almost exclusively on her own feelings—her fear, her shock, her dismay and disgust—how eager she'd been to return home to Princeton—she'd said very little about either of the men as if she hadn't seen them really but only just the stabbing
It happened so fast—it was just so awful—that poor man bleeding like that!—and no one could help him. And the man with the knife just—drove away…
But Mr. Karr who was Rhonda's Daddy and an important professor at the University knew exactly what the story meant for the young black man with the knife—the young
person of color
—was clearly one of
an exploited and disenfranchised class of urban ghetto dwellers rising up against his oppressors crudely striking as he could, class-vengeance, an instinctive “lynching,” the white victim is collateral damage in the undeclared and unacknowledged but ongoing class war
. The fact that the delivery-van driver had stabbed—killed?—a pedestrian was unfortunate of course, Mr. Karr conceded—a tragedy of course—but
who could blame the assailant who'd been provoked, challenged—hadn't the pedestrian struck his vehicle and threatened him—shouted obscenities at him—a good defense attorney could argue a case for self-defense—the van driver was protecting himself from imminent harm, as anyone in his situation might do. For there is such a phenomenon as
racial instinct, self-protectiveness. Kill that you will not be killed
.