Habit of Fear Read online

  She said the prayer of her childhood, the Lord’s Prayer, and closed her eyes, waiting. Her mouth was dry, and the foul taste had to be of fear. But the panic had passed. She was able to remember a detective she’d heard lecture on rape and how he’d driven home the point again and again: don’t fight it. Don’t resist. It’s your life that matters most. Save it. … Don’t fight. Don’t resist …

  The lame one, if he was lame, had a knife. While they pulled off her clothes, he slashed through buttons, straps, whatever obstructed them. To make her shape up, to take whatever position suited them best, he kept pricking her with the small sharp blade. They helped one another clumsily, obscenely. One sodomized her. The pain bolted into her head, all that way, with every thrust. When she passed out, they revived her. The knifer raped her, the pain just as bad, its source so close to the other wound. When conscious, she feigned unconsciousness and tried to concentrate on color, sunsets, Cezanne, oranges.

  When they were finished with her, they bound and gagged her with pieces of her clothing they pulled out of her duffel bag. The smell of semen and sweat made her retch and choke under the gag. The sodomist removed the gag to let her vomit and get her breath. Then he gagged her again. He threw her coat over her and over her head something that smelled of dampness and mold. The doll’s blanket, she thought.

  She lay utterly still. They did not speak except to make sounds of urgency to one another. When the door opened, she could see a speck of light. It vanished when the door closed. She watched for the light to appear again. When it didn’t she knew that they were gone.

  With her first attempt to move she almost passed out again. After that she plotted every change of position before she tried it. First she got her head out from under the blanket and studied the contents of the trailer. A table and several folding chairs. A naked unlighted bulb hung over the table. Thin, horizontal ribs of daylight streaked the ceiling, seeping through the upturned slats of the blinds. She watched for some time until a shadow moved across the ceiling. She made a noise, but from behind the gag, it wasn’t much of a noise. Nor was the thump of her head on the floor.

  She turned her attention to the door. Reason told her that if they had had to fasten it closed from inside, they must have pushed it closed after them on something to make it hold when they left, a thickness of flexible material, rags, say, or folded paper. On her side, moving with care, she inched toward the door. Her hands, tightly bound, were getting numb. So were her feet. She tried to sit up and flung herself down again with the pain. Even more cautiously then, on her back, she eased close and pushed on the door with her feet. The wedge ought to have fallen but it didn’t, and the pain again became more than she could handle. She rested and shepherded her strength. When she was reasonably sure of not passing out before the impact, she gathered her feet, her knees to her chest, and let them fly at the door. When it swung open, she hauled her feet back into the trailer and let the wracking pain ease off. With the fullness of light she could see her own body. Some of the knife pricks had gone in deeply. Some wounds were blood-caked, some still oozing. She tried to reach one on her breast with her tongue. Nausea. She stank all over. Sweat drenched her body, chilled and revived her. She scanned the wasteland for the vagrant with the shopping bags. Gone. She thought of trying to reach the ground. To try to hop? Even the thought was excruciating. She couldn’t even handle the pain when she tried to reach the strap with which her ankles were bound. Nor could she use her numb fingers until she had pressed her wrists even more tightly together and gradually brought the pins and needles and then the feeling back into her hands. Lying on her side, she began to work her thumbs beneath the gag. She bruised her lips but managed to get one thumb into her mouth. She intended to use her teeth as a fulcrum against which to stretch the gag. And the plan was working when she discovered the consolation of having her thumb in her mouth: it gave her such comfort that she closed her eyes and for a little while was mother to herself.

  The tardy watchman found her that way.

  THREE

  JULIE HAD RIDDEN ONCE before in a car with the sirens screaming—when she’d been taken to the morgue by the police to identify a murder victim. It drifted through her mind that if she needed identification, they would call Jeff. No.

  She must have said the word aloud, for someone reassured her. “It’s going to be all right. You’re safe now.” She opened her eyes and a young medic riding on the jump seat winked at her solicitously. “They’ll get the bastards.”

  How, she wondered, did he know there was more than one?

  There were many things she wondered as she drifted in and out of sleep in the hours and days that followed. She wondered at the meanings of the various medical attentions. A stubborn infection set in from the several knife wounds. The doctors were having trouble keeping her temperature down. They’d taken to calling her Sebastian. “How’s my little Sebastian this morning?” Neither males nor saints appealed to her. She kept silent. She wondered how Dr. Callahan came to be sitting at her bedside one day when she opened her eyes. How many appointments had she had to cancel to be there? She wondered how Jeff felt, how he really felt, trying to hold her hand. She took it away and hid it beneath the sheet. How had they first come to know? Was it the newspapers? On television … Gossip columnist raped. … Wife of noted newspaper columnist. … She didn’t want to speak to anyone and didn’t. Except to the police, who came regularly to prod her for just a little more information. And any help she could give in identifying her attackers could save other women from her experience. She tried to care, to sort out why it had happened to her. Any woman would have done them, the female of any species. And there came the moment when the police therapist tried to get through to her by assuring her that her husband, an intelligent, understanding man, would not reject her because of what had happened. Julie looked at the woman, grimly amused.

  “You’d be surprised,” the therapist said, oozing kindness.

  So would you, Julie thought, but she said nothing.

  She wasn’t even curious about all the flowers, from whom or from where they’d come. She did like one arrangement that arrived without any card at all, tiny golden roses. “They don’t even look real,” the nurse said.

  Nothing much did.

  When the infection healed and it was time for her to leave the hospital, she became the very model of cooperation. She intended to prove her competence; under no circumstances did she intend to return to Sixteenth Street. A friend from the Actors’ Forum came and camped with her for a few days at Forty-fourth Street. The greatest healer was making living quarters out of the shop. The waves of revulsion came more rarely. She could generally turn them aside before they swamped her. Which was not so with the almost constant rage over the Jeff situation. She was sick of her own anger, but she could not escape it. She needed help. It was funny how much better she felt just admitting it. Dr. Callahan gave up a lunch hour to see her right away.

  IT DID NOT SEEM like old times. Not at all. Except for the long silence between them before she was finally able to say, “Jeff wants a divorce.”

  “Let’s talk about it,” the doctor said, which was more than she had used to say, even to get things going. Jeff had said she would be supportive, and as usual, he was right.

  Julie declined the couch. That way she was able to talk. “I don’t mean he wants it because of what happened to me. I’m not laying that on him. But I keep thinking that’s why it happened. I went crazy when he said it, wild, you know—out of control. The very things I didn’t want to say I kept saying over and over. The only way I could stop was by getting out of the house.”

  “What did you say that you didn’t want to say?”

  “Things like ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Or, ‘What am I going to do?’”

  “Why was that such a terrible thing to say?”

  “I wanted it to be me who asked for the divorce.”

  “Oh,” the doctor said, drawing the sound out almost mockingly. Was it the
truth? Julie wondered. It felt like it. “So why didn’t you do it?”

  “I couldn’t. I was afraid to. I’m not sure what I’m saying is true, doctor. I can’t remember thinking seriously of divorce until Jeff brought it out in the open. I feel I did, but that’s not knowing. I’m not making sense, am I?”

  “Go on.”

  “I panicked but I didn’t want him to know it. I didn’t want him to see how shaky I was, but I couldn’t help myself. And that made me angry.”

  “With yourself?”

  “Who else?”

  “And you were afraid. Is that what you mean by panicked?”

  Julie nodded. “All of a sudden I was nobody again. There was nothing of me in that living room. I remember looking for a china giraffe I’d bought in a Paris flea market, the one thing of mine, but when I found it, I put it right back on the shelf.”

  The doctor sat, her forefinger touching her lower lip, her dark eyes blinking as she stared at Julie while Julie recounted the length and depth of the reliance on Jeff. Then, winding up: “But I’m not going back. Even if … I’m not.”

  “All of a sudden you were nobody again.” The therapist picked up on something she had said sometime before.

  “Growing up with my mother’s name. I never even knew my father, except for his picture on the mantel. I’ve said this to you so many times.”

  “Go on.”

  “I think she made up all the stories about him, an Irish diplomat who up and disappeared after he got the marriage annulled. I guess he was a Catholic. And you know what that makes me as far as the church is concerned. Oh, to hell with him. To hell with him! I’ve been saying it all my life.”

  “Tut, tut, tut,” the doctor chided. “You are guessing. You think she made up the stories. What do you know?”

  Julie was given pause. What did she know? As a child she had asked questions, and as a child she had liked what her mother told her, and she had believed every word, even the ones she knew were contradictory. As to the question still foremost in her mind, why the annulment? It was one question her mother answered consistently right up to the end of her life. “Because it was what he wanted.” Her mother was great at giving men what they wanted. Julie looked at her watch.

  The doctor repeated the question in that voice Julie recognized from old whenever she’d been trying to escape the couch: “What do you know?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Not anything? No marriage license? No record of annulment? No friends of your mother’s to talk to, no best man, no maid of honor at their wedding? No wedding photographs? Nothing about him on your birth certificate?”

  “That was almost thirty years ago, doctor. It’s a long time.”

  “Thank you for telling me. You amaze me: you are curious about every urchin on the street. You play detective. You dig up secret lives of celebrities and do not even know your father’s name.”

  “I do know that,” Julie said softly.

  “So?”

  “Thomas Francis Mooney. And I know he was born in Ireland. It’s on my birth certificate.”

  “And your name on the birth certificate?”

  “Julie Anne Richards.”

  “Your mother’s maiden name, yes?”

  “With a notation about my father—whereabouts unknown.”

  “Very curious.” It was one of Dr. Callahan’s rare comments. She adjusted her analyst’s chair to relieve a back strain. “How do you feel about the men who attacked you?”

  “I loathe them. It makes me sick to think about them.”

  “Do you think about them?”

  “I can almost turn it off now, but in a way that’s bad. I ought to be trying to remember things about them if I’m going to be any help to the police.”

  “Do you feel ashamed? Guilty?”

  “I don’t know about ashamed exactly. I feel dirty. As though a thousand enemas wouldn’t clean me out. But guilty, no. Not this trip.”

  The doctor nodded understanding. “A thousand enemas will help. And getting on with your life. That is the important thing. You are not going back, so you are going forward, yes? Do you want to talk about the impending divorce?”

  “I don’t know what there is to talk about. The sooner the better. Did you think it would happen? I mean back when I was in therapy with you?”

  The doctor almost smiled. “I am not always right,” she said. “Do you wish to resume therapy?”

  “No. For one thing, I can’t afford it.”

  “Do you still have the job on the newspaper?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there will be a divorce settlement, no? You were not married yesterday. How many years?”

  “Nine. I will not take any more money from Jeff.”

  The therapist breathed deeply, as though she needed patience. “So you have come full circle. Independence.”

  Sarcasm? Julie wasn’t sure. “I hope so, doctor. Maybe that way I’ll get rid of the anger. I wish I understood it. It’s like an obsession.”

  “Is it possible that you need it at the moment?”

  Julie thought about that. She was surprised. “Possibly,” she admitted.

  The doctor released the brake on her chair. “Total independence is as neurotic as total dependence. Fortunately, either condition is beyond most of us. You know I am here in an emergency.”

  Julie thanked her.

  No good-bye, no handshake, no convoy to the door: it made for a continuity of sorts, something unfinished, something that might never be finished.

  FOUR

  IF DR. CALLAHAN WAS amazed at Julie’s only occasional curiosity about her father, so was Julie now that she looked at it from what might be called an adult perspective. It was as though there was a door in the house that she, as a child, had been told could not be opened. She had grown up with the feeling of truth about the unknowability of her father. There were no wedding pictures among her mother’s papers, no certificate of marriage such as Julie and Jeff had received from the minister. Her mother seemed to have erased every possible image of him and filled in the vacancy when Julie asked questions with whatever came into her mind. Was the name Mooney a fabrication? No. That was on her birth certificate, not to be nullified by “whereabouts unknown.” But it was totally missing from her certificate of baptism, an event that occurred eight months later in the Protestant Episcopal Church. It was a church in which to this day she felt an alien for all that she had grown up in it. The seed of Rome seemed, somehow, not to have died.

  IT WAS OVER TWO WEEKS since she had been in the New York Daily office. She did not go in regularly in the normal order of things, only to meetings and her occasional bout with the Terminal Data System when her partner was out of town. She went in that day as part of therapy—to get on with her life. With every step her dread grew stronger.

  Tim Noble, her collaborating columnist, spotted her coming along outside the glass-enclosed editorial room and hastened to meet her. She hesitated as he came close. He stopped short. Then they rushed into each other’s arms. It was hard to break away and stand face to face.

  “You’re looking great,” Tim said.

  “You too,” Julie said. And he did look good to her: a homely face with a lovely smile and ears that looked as though he had been picked up by them as a child.

  He tried awkwardly to keep pace with her as they reached the main aisle of the vast room. “Do you feel as good as you look?”

  “I feel pretty good,” she said with all the cheer she could muster.

  Everybody stood up and either saluted or shook hands as she and Tim moved along to their cubicle. Such a reception wouldn’t have come with an appendectomy, she thought. She willed herself off that track until she saw the bouquet of white carnations on her desk. White. With a drop of red at their hearts. She had to stop seeing symbols even when they were obvious. The boss, Tom Hastings, came out from his office, hesitated about it, and then kissed her on the cheek.

  Julie thanked him for the reward t
he paper had posted for information leading to the arrest and conviction … Five thousand dollars, recently upped to ten.

  Hastings merely nodded. “It’s nice to have you back on the job,” he said and retreated to his office.

  The others returned to their desks, the kindest thing they could have done.

  “I promise I won’t make jokes,” Tim said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, do.”

  “Okay. Did you ever see such a guilty bunch of dudes in your life? I’ll bet there isn’t a guy in the office who’s laid his wife in the last two weeks.”

  “That’s a joke?” She shuddered. She wasn’t out of the trauma by any means.

  Tim sank his head between his shoulders and got onto something safer. “Have you been able to read the column?”

  She made an effort. “That’s why I’m here. I was afraid you didn’t need me anymore.”

  Tim grinned and reached out his hand. Involuntarily she drew away. Realizing, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard. “It’s great you’re back,” he said.

  She tried to sit more loosely in her chair, to feel comfortable. But it was not going to happen, not that day.

  “Why don’t you take off something and stay for a while?”

  She shook her head. “Tim, I’m going to be wobbly for a while. Not only because of … the rape. There, I’ve said it and it feels better. I know somebody who won’t say the word cancer. She calls it the big C.”

  “There are a lot of big C’s—courage, confidence …”

  “What I started to say is: Jeff and I are getting a divorce.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Don’t be frivolous about it, Tim.”

  “I’ve never been more unfrivolous in my life. I won’t knock the guy, but I think it’s the best thing that could happen to you.”

  “He’s in love with another woman. God! That sounds corny.”