Читать книгу Where Drowned Things Live - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 8

Q: Could you briefly outline the route which led you from your work on madness in the classical age to the study of criminality and delinquency?

M.F.: When I was studying during the early 1950’s, one of the great problems that arose was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions which it could serve . . . [A] whole number of interesting questions were provoked. These can all be summed up in two words: power and knowledge. I believe I wrote Madness and Civilization to some extent within the horizon of these questions.

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge

The grey sky had lifted when I exited Myerson and a rarely seen setting sun tipped the gothic towers of the university with gold as though they had been heavily gilded. This display did little to lighten my mood, however, as I walked home with the rest of the academic community streaming from the campus toward the train and bus stops, or their homes in the communities surrounding the campus. There is no point in driving to work in Hyde Park, or what is called “Hyde No-Park.” There are very few parking spaces on campus, and on the adjoining streets ‘residents only’ stickers keep commuters at bay. The university ran shuttle buses that came in especially handy in the sub-zero temperatures of the Chicago winters, but today in late October it was actually pleasant.

I live only three blocks from campus in a Prairie-style Victorian (that meant there was a reduced amount of ginger-bread as Midwesterners had altered the fanciful Victorian style to fit their more sober tastes). The tall, thin houses have only thirty feet between them, with garages opening on to alleys in the back. Lined up along the street, they always remind me of rows of teeth, kind of housing dentures.

I was often told I was lucky to have found a house that was so close to campus. This was told to me by people who had never owned a home that was 125 years old. When we moved in, there was a dead rat in the kitchen. Carol, one-half of the live-in couple who helped me take care of the boys and the house, said, “At least it’s dead.”

Yes. I thought that was a plus. But I wondered what it had died of.

The house needed absolutely everything—new plumbing, new wiring, storm windows, paint, and new appliances. The list was endless.

Well, we’d started the painting. The boys, Carol and I, and Carol’s husband Giles were dabbing paint on from time to time. We had decided on bright yellow with green trim as an explicit insult to the grey of Chicago.

Giles was from Senegal and doing a Ph.D. in math at the university. Carol was from Iowa and at the School of Social Work. I had thought that tackling the painting would be a nice project for all of us to undertake together. But between caring for the boys, doing our various kinds of academic work and keeping up with the housekeeping, the boys would be graduating from college by the time we finished.

I will hire somebody, I thought to myself as I walked down our street and saw the expanses of beige peeling paint on my house illuminated by the setting sun. I could afford it. Unlike most instructors, I am not poor. I had that trust fund. When we’d married, Marco had wanted no part of my trust fund money, and I’d just thought we’d keep it for the boys’ education (since it was likely to cost a million dollars each by the time they reached that age). When Marco had died, I didn’t care. I used it to support us during my graduate school work and then, when I’d gotten the instructor job at the university, I’d plunked down the money for this over-priced piece of crumbling real estate without a qualm.

I saw the ladders from the weekend’s painting were still lying along the side of the house where we had left them. Not good. I made a mental note to ask Giles to help me lock them in the garage later tonight. We have a fairly high crime rate in Hyde Park. The surrounding communities are not affluent, and some are quite poor, and in our racist country, consequently mostly black. They seemed to regard the mostly white, upscale university as a deliberate insult to their existence (it is) and a shoplifting mall (it is). Students are incredibly lax about locking, picking up after themselves or the simplest security measures. The ones who are mugged are usually those who decided to walk alone to get a pizza at 2 in the morning. They leave their rooms unlocked and are surprised when they return to find all their electronics are no longer there.

As I walked up to the sagging porch (I really needed a contractor, not just a painter), I could smell dinner. Giles does the cooking and he uses a lot of spice. My palate had certainly been expanded beyond my parents’ white-bread meals.

When I opened the door, the smell became stronger. Not African, Italian.

Marco’s mother, at least, must be here and probably also his father. If my parents were cold fish, Marco’s parents were as far as you could get in the opposite direction. Their affection was like being wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket. All the time. They were overwhelming in their care of me and the boys after Marco died. In fact, they would have taken over our lives if I had let them. And I’d almost let them. It had only been in the two years or so and our move to Hyde Park that I’d tried to pull back a little and define our lives myself. It wasn’t easy.

“Mom, Mom, Nonna and Nonno are here!” Two faces, two voices raised to a decibel no human voice should be able to achieve. Sam and Mike came barreling down the long center hallway and careened into me. At six, they packed quite a wallop. I dropped to my knees, both to hug them and to keep from being knocked over backwards.

“Hey, guys! Big, big hug.” We all linked arms and swayed first right and then left, faster and faster until we all went tumbling onto the floor. It was our ritual greeting since the time they could walk, but it was getting tougher and tougher not to get flattened on the floor when we did it. They each weighed about fifty-five pounds and could take me down when they chose.

“Kris-tin-a?”

Mama Ginelli called from the kitchen at the back. Nonna’s rolling Italian accent made my name into three syllables. You’d think Nonna had been born in Genoa, but she was a native Chicagoan. She’d grown up in the kind of closed, ethnic community that so characterized Chicago with churches, stores and clubs rooted in particular immigrant identities. That was eroding some, now, but it hadn’t affected Nonna in the least. Or maybe it had, and she was clinging to it nevertheless.

“Yes, Nonna, we’re coming,” I called obediently.

I gathered a bunch of child under each arm and left my briefcase on the floor where it had fallen under their assault. I’d get it later.

“Let’s march.”

We frog-marched, arms linked, bumping into the walls of the narrow hallway and staggered into the kitchen.

Nonna turned from the stove where she’d been stirring the sauce that was the source of the intense garlic smell in the house. Marco’s mother was fully a foot and a half shorter than I am, with a bosom that could double as a tray if she would ever eat in bed, a luxury, I was sure, she would never permit herself. With her steel-grey hair pulled back into a severe bun and a floral patterned dress, should could have been posing for an ad for pasta sauce. ‘Tastes like Mama made it!’

“There you are. Finally. These boys have missed you so.”

Yes, while Nonna was warm and basically sweet, was there a mother-in-law alive who would miss a chance to distribute a little guilt to a working daughter-in-law?

“Now Natalie. You know she keeps better hours these days.”

Marco’s father was behind us, seated at the built-in breakfast nook under the kitchen window. I was surprised he could still fit between the bench and the table. Since his retirement last year, Marco’s father, Vincent Ginelli, had probably put on a good twenty pounds or more. And that was on top of the weight his six-foot frame had already carried. The beer bottle in front of him looked like it was almost empty.

I turned and winked at him. Vince winked back. He loved it when we shared a joke on Natalie.

Marco’s father had also been a cop. He and Natalie had both been devastated by Marco’s death; I was surprised he hadn’t retired right after that. But he’d stuck it out—not just for the pension increase, but I thought because he had to continue or he would have been consumed by the anger as well as grief.

He had certainly approved of my leaving the force since he’d never really approved of my being on the force to begin with. Not a woman’s job, though he’d also been a little proud of me. At least I hoped he had been.

Now, both he and Natalie really liked it that I was a professor. They would have preferred I stay home, of course, but they found my ‘studying all the time’ a source of pride and a little awe. I was in Religion (never mind the Philosophy). Very respectable. (If they only knew). Marco had seen to it that the boys had been baptized Catholic, but we didn’t go to church. They knew that, but didn’t nag. As long as I mourned their son, they seemed willing to forgive me anything.

“I thought you two were still in Wisconsin with Vince, Jr. and Marilyn.”

Vince and Natalie had had five children, all boys. They spent their retirement now visiting the four boys and their families in turn in a large motorhome. I wondered where they had parked it.

Vince, Jr. was Marco’s oldest brother. He and his wife had four kids.

“Marilyn’s mother came on the weekend and we came on back,” Natalie explained without turning from her sauce.

Well, that was why they were here. Daughter-in-law Marilyn was from California, and her mother Beverly, several times divorced, could not have been more different from Natalie. They were from different planets, different galaxies even. Not that Natalie would have had to share the kitchen with Beverly. Beverly knew exactly how to order take-out in any city she visited.

On the other hand, I did know somebody who minded that Natalie took over the kitchen when she came.

“Where’s Giles?” I asked.

“Oh, he took that stew he was making up to their apartment.”

Natalie knew she’d driven Giles out and her uncharacteristically short sentence revealed it. And she was probably still upset over Beverly’s unexpected arrival at Vince, Jr.’s.

Great. I sighed inwardly. Giles took his cooking very seriously and did not like to have dinner plans changed at the drop of a hat. Now we were going to have someone in a French African funk for a few days until we ate enough Giles-cooked food to make it up to him. Fortunately, the boys would eat literally anything you put in front of them.

They were over by the stove now, behind Natalie, sniffing around like hungry puppies.

“When do we eat? When do we eat?” they chorused together.

I wondered vaguely if their simultaneous talking, something they had done since they had learned to speak, as I’d learned twins did, should continue to worry me. I’d raised it as a concern with their pediatrician several times over the years, and been waved off with ‘they’ll grow out of it.’ Fine. But when?

“Can we eat soon, Natalie? We have Tae Kwon Do class tonight at seven and I like them to digest a little before class.”

Three nights a week the boys and I took classes in Korean martial arts at the local Y. They loved it and so did I. I’d learned some self-defense techniques at the police academy, but this was different.

Taw Kwon Do meant “the art of hands and feet.” It was much more graceful than Karate, emphasizing quick kicks and jump turns to get out of an assailant’s way. The boys needed the structure of the class and a release for their nearly inexhaustible energy. I needed the chance to kick and punch the blue pads we used. I would imagine specific faces on the bags. I always felt like a rag doll after class, but more alive, more human.

“So, show your old Nonno what you learn in this class of yours.”

Vince extracted his bulk from the banquette and stood up, mimicking a martial arts fighting stance.

With a whoop, the boys were on him, throwing kicks and punches at his knees and thighs. Their high-pitched yells, called a “kihap” by our teacher, attracted Molly, our golden retriever from outside where she’d probably been napping in the last of the sunshine. She banged through the kitchen dog door and jumped up on poor Vince’s back.

“Ah, oh—coming to get me are you? Down, Molly, down. Think that will get me, huh? Oh, Sam, not so hard—Molly!”

Vince was sounding out of breath and increasingly desperate.

“Kristin! Get this . . . dog off me!”

Vince always had trouble moderating his natural swearing in front of the boys.

“Charyuht!”

I yelled that command for attention directly behind the boys. One of the first things we’d learned in class was that not to obey that command could get you thrown out of class. Since the boys would rather be deprived of all video games for a month rather than being denied Tae Kwon Do class, they had learned to respond immediately.

Commands of any kind had no effect on Molly, so I grabbed her collar and forced her to sit. Luckily she’s so docile most of the time it doesn’t matter.

“Say, that’s, that’s . . . pretty good,” Vince puffed.

His face was starting to return to his normal ruddy color rather than the mottled purple it had been a minute ago. His breathing was still ragged, though. I was increasingly alarmed at how little stamina he had these days.

“Eat, eat!”

Natalie was ready to serve.

At least she no longer said, “Mange, mange.”

When I first met Marco, his mother’s Italianisms used to drive him crazy. I had found it sweet and harmless. Of course, I could afford to, they weren’t my parents. Our own parents can get to us in ways no one else possibly can.

Natalie staggered across the kitchen with a huge platter of spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce, cheese piled high on top. She deftly elbowed past me when I tried to take the heavy platter from her. So I just cleared a path between children and the dog so she could get to the table unmolested. It was a near thing. I spotted a Matchbox car and kicked it in the direction of the counter before she stepped on it.

As we all squeezed into the breakfast nook and bowed our heads, my mind wandered to Giles and Carol. I’d better try to mend that fence before we went to class.

But by the time Natalie and Vince left, we’d barely time to climb into our uniforms and out the door to class. The speed with which the boys could get those martial arts uniforms on was a constant source of amazement to me, especially compared to their glacial pace getting dressed for school in the morning.

I grabbed my keys and shouted up the stairs to Carol and Giles we were leaving. I’d have to deal with that conversation later.

When we got back the boys fell on their beds and went immediately to sleep. I pulled off their uniforms from their slack little bodies and covered them up well. I sighed over teeth brushing, vowing to make them do more in the morning.

I went over to the door that led to Carol and Giles’ apartment on the third floor. Time to face the music about the spaghetti.

“Giles? Could you come down and help me with something?”

I really did want to get those ladders locked up and couldn’t do it alone. I figured carrying the ladders to the garage would give us some time to talk.

“Yes?”

Giles came slowly down the stairs, his brown eyes cloudy behind his wire-rimmed glasses. His long, narrow face was giving nothing away, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed he was still upset. He was slender, and he dressed exclusively jeans, tee shirt and flip-flops. He wore flip-flops indoors and out until Carol wrestled them away from him in early December.

“Could you help me move those ladders into the garage?”

Giles just nodded.

Great. I’d been surrounded today either by people I wanted to talk to me who wouldn’t, or by people who wanted to talk to me whom I wished would shut up.

We went out the kitchen door, Molly following us expectantly. Without exchanging a word, we lifted the ladder on top and started to maneuver it to the garage at the back of the small, oblong yard.

As I tried to avoid tripping over Molly, who was entranced by this new game, I tried to think of how to apologize for Natalie’s rudeness without further offending Giles.

We slid the first ladder into the garage, along the inside wall, and started to walk back to get the second. I had a brainstorm. I would criticize Natalie’s cooking.

“Well, at least you and Carol got to have a decent meal tonight. I could hardly do class with Mama’s heavy pasta and sauce in me.”

We picked up the second ladder and Giles looked at me across its length.

“It was not good?”

He looked a little less grim.

“You know how she is, the more garlic the better. You can’t taste anything else. It ruins the whole meal.”

I put my end of the ladder down and Giles bent and slid it efficiently next to the other one inside the garage. I locked the door.

He hummed tunelessly as we walked back to the house. I sighed with my garlic breath (it really had been a little too strong). Another relational fire extinguished.

I opened my portable computer on the kitchen table and logged on to my email account. I opened the document I’d sent myself about my conversations with Ah-seong Kim. I’d need to add the conversations with Lester too, and I struggled over the wording. Drat. Without the complaint form guidelines in front of me, I was floundering over the formatting. Still, as I typed I realized writing it up while it was still fresh in my mind was crucial. I could cut and paste it into the online complaint form when I got the password. I sent Henry an email asking him if he knew what it was, and then I saved the file and closed the computer.

I went to put on the night bolt on the kitchen door and the smell of the garlic in the kitchen hit me again. If I didn’t want to have to face that at breakfast, I’d better take the trash out tonight.

I grabbed the trash bag from under the sink and called to Molly. No woof in response. She was probably sacked out on one of the kid’s beds. She’d been out with Giles and me earlier so I decided to let her be. I normally took her out one more time for a short walk down the alley and back just before bed, but we could skip that.

The night had turned cloudy and colder with very little moon. I skipped a coat, though. If you start wearing coats in October in Chicago you won’t toughen up for the months to come.

Our skinny yard, fenced on each side, ended with two garages that opened on to an alley at the back. Between the garages, a walkway stretched to the alley where the trashcans were located. Our yard was floodlit from the back of the house, but it was still a little dim closer to the garages.

I reached the gate at the end of the walkway and saw that it stood open. I was furious. The kids were strictly forbidden to go in and out of the alley and the open gate meant that Molly could get out.

The alley could be dangerous for kids and unleashed dogs. It was not well lit, and kids from the high school on the south end of the alley loved to drag race up and down its narrow length. They’d careened more than once into our cans, but you couldn’t relocate the cans. Sanitation workers in Chicago would refuse to take your trash if the cans were not where they were supposed to be. I’d learned that after moving the trash cans to the side of the garage after the last drag race trash can collision. My trash was still in the cans after normal pick-up day. So I’d dragged them back and let them be sitting ducks.

I didn’t like that gate being opened. It meant somebody had probably cut through our yard or intended to.

I pushed the gate all the way open. There were no cars in the alley. I turned, pulled off a trash can lid and started to stuff the bag into the already overcrowded can when I heard a noise that made my heart nearly stop. Next to my right ear, somebody took a breath.

I started to turn in that direction and the next second I saw a shadow rise up. I pulled back as far as I could against the rough brick of the garage wall and a hand holding a knife came slashing down directly where I had been standing a moment before.

Reacting more than thinking, I grabbed at the arm with the knife as it rose up again and pulled with all my might to the side. My assailant rocketed into the narrow walkway and I gave him as assist with a sidekick to his ribs. I felt my foot connect and I heard a grunt. I hoped it was a grunt of pain.

I turned to run down the alley and nearly fell over the can now spilled at my feet.

I jumped over it and continued running, yelling at the top of my lungs. Behind me I heard a thud as the attacker also jumped over the can.

I hadn’t disabled him with that kick.

He was following.

Damn this poorly lit alley.

I picked up my pace but the following footfalls sounded like they were gaining on me.

I zigged left and then turned as the knife came slashing down again. I chopped down hard on the arm holding the knife and used that momentum to hook my right foot behind him and flip him on to his back. I heard an “oomph” as he fell back, but it was muffled by his stocking masked face.

He had grabbed my left wrist as he fell. I twisted and wrenched away from his grip and that meant the slashing knife meant for my chest only raked down my arm from elbow to wrist. I jumped back, keeping my eyes on my assailant and cursed myself for leaving my cell phone in the kitchen.

I braced myself for another attack and I heard a noise. The revving of an engine of a car entering the alley behind me. I turned and ran toward it, yelling my head off. My attacker turned tail and ran the other way.

I kept my injured arm by my side and waved the other arm, flagging down the car. Two guys getting ready to race down the alley caught me and my bloody arm in their headlights.

They cut the engine and opened their doors.