Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  The executioner will contain his electric bolts so that the killings he performs will be humane. He makes clear in interviews what a challenge this is. He boasts: I take extraordinary care to see that the amperage and voltage I calculate to complete the job succeeds without overkill. (Presumably, his pun was not deliberate.)

  The electrician measures his convicted killers, weighs them, surveys the density of their muscles and body fat, and devises mathematical formulas as to exactly how powerful to set his bolts of lightning. The results of his computation mean that he executes his victims by delivering ten thousand volts of electricity via five charges, one after the other, two thousand volts at a time. The executioner feels one single large surge is too risky as it might blow out the death house circuitry. No one wants to rummage around in their junk drawers for a fuse with the condemned prisoner only half dead. The calculated five electric charges will not be so weak as to leave the condemned alive, yet not so potent as to cause him to combust.

  The executioner/electrician says: My job is to determine the precise amount of electricity to kill without mutilating.

  Now the executioner explains to the State Prison Advisory Board that, physically, the cop killer and Malm are two disparate body types; the cop killer is short and skinny—small-boned—and Malm is tall and solid—big-boned and muscular what with his military training, a physique he has maintained.

  The executioner is instructed to clam up and just do his job.

  The man considers himself, above all, a professional. He feels that strictly obeying the instructions of the state is even more important than his desire to do a consummate job. After all, the state is paying him a bonus beyond just a doubling of his usual excellent fee. He will get the job done as directed so he clams up.

  He averages out all the statistics he’s come up with on his two victims and bases the amperage on that mean.

  Shortly after being denied clemency, with only four hours left before he is to die, Bob Malm asks to speak to the warden and that request is granted. He announces he’d like to donate his body to medicine with his eyes going to the Connecticut Eye Bank. In order for a prisoner to do that, the warden is required to request permission from his nearest kin because the law directs that once he is dead, his body no longer belongs to him; it is not left to Robert Malm to decide what should be done with his body.

  Bob knows this. He is, perhaps, finagling a way to put off his execution. But the warden goes to work, calls every service available to him and manages to reach Bob’s long-estranged sister in California who tells him that Bob’s decision is all right with her. She also tells the warden that she does not intend to claim his body. As for Connecticut’s policy to bury unclaimed prisoners in potter’s field if he changes his mind about donating his body to science—that’s fine with her.

  The warden tells Robert Malm that his eyes will be given to the Connecticut Eye Bank and his body to the Yale School of Medicine. Bob Malm says to him, There’s a monster inside me. The monster killed the girl. And he did the same thing before, many times, and was never caught. He has to die.

  So in his own way, Bob Malm finally, at the last hour, sort of takes responsibility for not only killing Irene, but other unknown girls as well; he blames a monster that resides in his body. He doesn’t apologize for the monster’s actions, doesn’t say the monster is sorry. When asked by a reporter what other girls the monster might have killed when he was a resident of California or as a seaman in the United States Navy serving in World War II, the Pacific Theater of Operations, he declines to say.

  Bob is fully integrated with the monster.

  Neither Bob nor the monster has any idea what remorse is. Neither did my brother, Tyler. When Tyler pushed the kid off the stool at the Lincoln Dairy, my father made him apologize and he did, but he wasn’t sorry, he was annoyed. Tyler did, in fact, have a monster that lived inside him. The monster’s name was autism. So maybe sociopathic behavior is within the ever-widening spectrum of autism. Maybe a sociopathy that requires murder to assuage the internal demon-monster is a developmental anomaly that someday will be diagnosed and treated. Who knows? Therefore, a theory—now defunct—that killers should be studied, not executed, in order to predict such sociopathy in others so they can be treated before they kill, makes sense to me.

  forty-four

  THERE ARE TEN WITNESSES waiting in the death chamber where the two consecutive executions are to take place. It is the only time in Connecticut’s history that this will occur. The witnesses include four reporters, including Jerry Demeusy of the Hartford Courant, two physicians who will declare the condemned dead—one for each man—and four prison officials. There are no law enforcers who were involved in the case present, and no family members either to witness the executions as there may or may not be today. No one’s considered such a thing yet.

  The ten men sit on two wooden benches, nothing separating them from the electric chair gerry-rigged of two-by-fours a few feet away.

  The young, brain-damaged cop killer is led into the death chamber accompanied by the warden, a priest, and four guards. The slight fellow is strapped to the electric chair crying. The guards place the electrodes at various points on his body; they fit a metal helmet lined with a wet sponge on his head. They drape a black cloth hood over the helmet. It is not the tradition in Connecticut to ask condemned men about to die if they have any final words. The warden, the priest—reading the Catholic prayers for the dead from a missal—and the guards back away and stand silent. The electrician seems bothered, as if he is thinking, Let’s get the show on the road. The warden touches his glasses, giving the signal for the executioner to commit what the law refers to as state-sponsored homicide.

  Upon the signal, the electrician turns to his oversized instrument panel, which is just a few feet to the left of the electric chair. He closes one large switch after another while he turns a rheostat control back and forth, watching his two meters carefully. The five two thousand-volt shocks drive a nine-ampere current of electricity through the metal helmet on John Donahue’s head, which passes swiftly through his body before exiting out the metal clamp around his ankle. His black hood catches fire. If his hair hadn’t been shaved off, it would have caught fire, too. His eyeballs explode, and blood and the liquid of his eyes run down his shirt from under the tattered, burnt remains of his hood.

  Jerry Demeusy says that the stench was even more unforgettable than the two popping noises and the blood and the flames and the smoke.

  One of the two physicians approaches the chair, puts a stethoscope to John Donahue’s chest, and unnecessarily pronounces him dead.

  Directly after the poached murderer is wheeled hastily out of the execution chamber, Robert Malm is led in surrounded by the same four men who had accompanied John Donahue. The stench remains; the blood hasn’t been wiped up off the floor; the whole room is full of smoke; and a peculiar ash is still floating about.

  All the witnesses now want out as they can barely keep from vomiting. But they hold on.

  Malm catches a glimpse of the chair and a half-smile forms on his face as opposed to the wide-eyed terror exhibited by Donahue. Perhaps he has detached himself from the monster and feels that he will not be executed after all—the monster will. His words to the Board of Pardons reflect such delusion: When Irene fell to the ground, dead, Malm was an innocent bystander.

  Bob is strapped into the chair, which is smeared with the previous fellow’s body fluids as well as his waste—his diaper hasn’t contained all that it was designed to. Before the hood is placed over his head, Bob Malm closes his eyes and the four men back off.

  The warden taps his eyeglasses, the executioner goes about his chain of actions for the second time that night. When he fires the quintuple bolts, Malm springs up, his big muscular body straining against the leather straps that harness him to the chair. He makes an inhuman noise and then he sags. Though limp in the chair, the inhuman noise persists in coming out from under his hood. The doctor goes to him, places
his stethoscope against Bob Malm’s chest, and declares him alive.

  The second physician jumps up, tries his stethoscope on Bob, and also declares him alive. This one says to the warden, What do we do now?

  The warden just keeps staring at the condemned man, who continues to make his god-awful noise. Then he looks to the executioner, a take-charge guy, who pulls himself up to his full height of five feet two and says sternly, Just wait—this man will die.

  The warden’s eyes dart to the doctors. The one who was supposed to declare Bob Malm dead says nothing at all, appears to be in shock. But the doctor who declared John Donahue dead steps up and says, It’s likely.

  The noise Bob Malm is making grows softer, he jerks a few more times, he goes limp again, jerks some more, and after a minute, begins grunting. Everyone waits. After another three minutes, he finally expires, something both doctors confirm. The witnesses are ordered to leave. A surgeon enters the death chamber with instruments and a metal box lined with dry ice. He takes the hood off Bob Malm’s head and removes his eyes.

  In the Hartford Courant, Jerry Demeusy writes: Bob Malm died hard.

  In all the articles the Courant and Times reporters had written about his crime, none of them ever said Irene died hard.

  Part IV

  What Goes Around . . .

  forty-five

  Peace Corps, Buea, Cameroon

  LIFE GOES ON: I finish college much to the joy of my family and then I join the Peace Corps much to their consternation. I receive an engraved invitation from Sargent Shriver to train at Columbia University for service in Cameroon. When my father breaks the news to Gramps, he says, They grow good grapes in Africa.

  I serve in a town five thousand feet up the side of Mt. Cameroon, an active volcano that itself rises more than thirteen thousand feet above the equatorial sea. The first white man to climb the mountain was Sir Richard Burton. In keeping with a tradition he began by leaving an empty cognac bottle at the summit with his name on a piece of paper plus a copy of Punch sealed inside, I make the climb and leave behind an empty beer bottle with my name and a copy of The New Yorker inside. The first black man to climb the mountain, centuries before Burton, was a honey harvester. When I climb the mountain, I go with a group of honey harvesters.

  I come home from Cameroon two years later, get a job, get married, have children, write during the wee hours, and sell my first novel to Doubleday in 1985.

  In 1990, what goes around begins to come around. My mother is seventy-five, complaining that she can’t keep food down. She is diagnosed with stomach cancer. I am in the hospital corridor eavesdropping when she tells her sister the news of her diagnosis.

  She says, Margaret, why is it always cancer?

  Auntie Margaret says, I don’t know, Florence, I just don’t know.

  There is a pause and then my mother says, So guess when the doctor decided to tell me?

  When?

  Right smack in the middle of Oprah! I missed the whole second half of the show.

  They both laugh. Auntie Margaret proceeds to tell her who Oprah had on during the second half and they chatter away, gossiping about the celebrity guests.

  The doctor opens my mother up, finds she is loaded with cancer, and doesn’t sew her back together again until he first removes 80 percent of her stomach. The doctor says to her, The surgery plus mild doses of chemotherapy will keep you out on the links for an extra year.

  But my mother, thinking positively, chooses to dismiss the last four words the doctor says. When she returns to the hospital a year later, no longer able to play golf what with the cancer having spread to all her other organs, she stops talking to me plus several people who love her. She believed that the operation made her all better, and since it turns out she is hardly all better, she blames us. I think, why isn’t she blaming the government?

  I blame the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.

  When my Auntie Palma comes to visit, my mother closes her eyes and looks away. Auntie Palma always refers to my mother as her best buddy and she is crushed.

  I’m feeling a little crushed myself. Once I had children of my own, my mother and I formed a new relationship; she became friendly toward me, the way she was with her friends. Not her close friends as there was no hope I’d ever be a golfer. But we would chitchat on the phone now and then, or go to dinner. I knew I was in her inner circle when she called one day with the news that my father was going on a business trip. My father had evolved into a self-made metallurgist, a ball bearings expert, and Wade Abbott began sending him off to consult with customers. So my mother said, He’s going to Mexico.

  A perfect straight man, I asked, Why?

  She said, Because the Mexicans are having trouble with their balls.

  So I say to my mother’s doctor, Can you do something for the depression?

  He looks at me like I am a moron. He says, She has terminal cancer.

  The bound galleys of my third novel, The Port of Missing Men, arrive a short time after my mother is hospitalized. Each day, my Auntie Margaret reads a chapter to her. Auntie Margaret tells me how much they both love it. The book is set in their era, the twenties, thirties, and forties. Auntie Margaret says, Mickey, you brought us back to great times—we were humming “I’ll Never Smile Again” all afternoon.

  She is the one to tell me all this because, of course, my mother is not speaking to me. I have failed her. I can’t stop her dying. But I know that she is at least smiling with Auntie Margaret.

  I log the seventy-five miles from my home to Hartford a couple of times a week over the next ten years beginning when my mother’s cancer renders her unable to play golf. One afternoon, I get stopped for speeding on I-84 by a state cop. I am racing home from Hartford so that I can get my daughter to a high school gymnastics exhibition and my son to a Babe Ruth playoff game. I tell the cop my excuse and I am shaking with such distress. Incredibly, his eyes grow moist and he says, I know, I know.

  Once I am calm, he tells me the main thing I have to do when driving is to concentrate on the road. The road and nothing, else, ma’am, nothing else. I promise him I will. I thank him.

  I DECIDE to do something about my mother’s depression. I take her out of the hospital to the Branford Hospice on the shoreline; the Connecticut shore, after all, is Shangri-La.

  The hospice is designed on the British model. She will have comfort and pain control in a lovely place without medical intervention. She doesn’t agree to go but she doesn’t disagree with my plan either since she’s not talking to me. She asks Auntie Margaret to pack one of her scarves so she’ll have something from home to look at. I choose one of my mother’s Vera scarves—black with an avocado green border. The pattern is silhouettes of running horses, nine in the avocado green, three in white, and three in a beautiful shade of blue-gray. Next to the name Vera in the corner of the scarf is Vera’s signature ladybug.

  Her room is full of sea breezes and flowering plants. The walls are mostly glass, the property full of hundred-year-old maples. The ceiling is wainscoted with finely grained wood. The director explains that since almost all of the patients are bedridden, they can study the grain of the wood instead of just staring at a blank white ceiling.

  Once my mother is settled in, the nurse tells her that if she would like something to eat or drink, she can have whatever she likes. She has only to ask. My mother says, I don’t want anything.

  The nurse asks, Then how about just a cup of coffee?

  No.

  Are you a tea drinker then?

  My mother snorts.

  Before she was depressed, my mother was always polite to strangers not counting Sandy Duncan.

  The nurse looks at me. She is an experienced hospice person who is therefore able to read my mind. I am psyching a message to the nurse: My mother loves coffee but she won’t have any because she’s depressed.

  The nurse says to my mother, Will you excuse me for just one minute, Mrs. Tirone?

  My mother nods and I notice the flare o
f her nostrils. If only she could storm out of the room.

  The nurse returns with three cups of coffee on a tray plus a white ceramic pitcher and a blue and white china sugar bowl. She says, My coffee break is coming up. Maybe you girls would like to share it with me.

  The coffee smells really good. She gives me my cup, and passes another to my mother, who takes it. She says, Cream, girls?

  We nod. She pours. It is actual cream as we are on the British model.

  Sugar?

  My mother asks, Do you have Sweet’n Low?

  The nurse smiles and says, We don’t have to bother with diets, do we?

  My mother responds to that. She smiles back. She says, Three spoonfuls, please.

  The nurse piles the sugar into my mother’s coffee.

  We all drink. The nurse says, Isn’t this lovely?

  It is.

  Then the nurse says, Are you a widow, Mrs. Tirone?

  My mother gazes out the window. No.

  The nurse looks to me, unable to read my mind this time. I say, My brother is autistic. My father is his caregiver.

  The nurse opens her mouth to say something no doubt along the lines of, Can’t someone relieve him? But a perky woman has come in the room carrying a guitar. She smiles at my mother and says, Would you like a song, Mrs. Tirone?

  My mother nods, this time incredulous rather than annoyed.

  The woman begins playing Love Me Tender. I catch my mother’s eye and we both burst out laughing. When we gain control, she says to me, Wait till I tell Margaret about this one.