Daddy accepted the story of me falling down stairs and wrote it off to teenage carelessness. I think I can recall him sort of chuckling about it, teasing me, probably glad that I had done something a little reckless for once in my otherwise boring life. It made both of us seem more normal, less starched. He filled my prescription, wagging his finger, and told me I was lucky I hadn’t broken my neck.
Six weeks later I thought I had the flu. It was the middle of July, hot as the tar on the roof of Hell, and I thought I was dying for sure. I ached all over and was so tired I could hardly raise my head or keep my eyes open. I slept all the time. Finally, Daddy became suspicious. At first he thought I had mononucleosis, then anemia. Exasperated after a few weeks more, he sent me to an internist, an old pal of his, who ordered a battery of tests for me that included blood work and a urinalysis. It took Dr. Goodman about one minute to assess the situation and give a diagnosis. I was sitting across from him at his desk in his office after my examination.
“You’re about ten weeks pregnant,” he said.
“That’s not funny,” I said and jumped up from my seat as though I had been sitting on a wet electrified fence.
“No, I don’t imagine that it is, Anna,” he said. “How old are you?” He was perfectly serious, assuming that I was some kind of teenage tramp to have deceived my long-suffering father in this unspeakable manner.
“It’s impossible,” I said, the words flying out of my mouth. “It is.”
Thank God and all of His angels and saints that Dr. Goodman had the presence of mind to search my face because he saw then, and most importantly he believed, that if I was telling the truth, then something else had gone terribly wrong. Indeed, something had.
One patient waited to see him in his waiting room as it was the end of his day.
“Anna,” he said quietly, getting up and coming around to my side of his desk. He took my icy hands in his and sighed heavily, looking at me for the longest time. “I have to leave you for a few minutes. There’s an elderly lady in my waiting room with an ear infection. I want you to sit here and try to reconstruct how this may have happened. Then you and I are going to figure this out, without anyone getting hysterical. It’s my job to worry, not yours, okay?”
He patted the back of my hands and as soon as he left the office, I began to shake all over. He may as well have plunged a dagger through the wall of my chest.
I tried to concentrate. The only time in my entire life that I had been unaware of a passage of time was after my prom. I knew then that I was carrying Everett Fairchild’s baby. Everett Fairchild had sex with me and I didn’t even know it had happened. What in the world was I going to do? Had I told him it was okay?
I asked myself the same question over and over—how could this have happened? And, why me? How horrible and unfair! I was supposed to go to the University of South Carolina in August! I had earned my escape! Now this? I paced his floor.
My anxiety skyrocketed as my whole future began to melt away right before my eyes. What would Daddy do? Would he get a gun and shoot Everett Fairchild dead? Would he force us into some kind of a marriage? Worst of all, I didn’t have the least desire to be a mother! Not at all! Abortion? No way! I was too terrified to even think of such a thing! What if it really was murder? I didn’t want to go to hell forever. But if God loved me, how could this have happened in the first place? Guardian angels? What good were they?
My fear escalated while my religious convictions waffled. I became more and more afraid and I had never felt more alone. I heard the nurse tell Dr. Goodman good night and that he should lock the doors.
By the time the next few minutes passed and Dr. Goodman returned, I was spiraling in quite a state, cold and shaking from head to toe and crying as hard as I ever had. I was loath to say that I had been raped, because I had no memory of it. I had never felt so hopeless and so helpless. Who would believe me? No one.
He offered me a box of tissues and a cup of water.
“You wouldn’t . . .” I said, stammering, “I can’t remember . . . oh, God!”
“Anna,” he said, in the most gentle of all voices I had ever heard from an adult, “look. I have an idea what went on here and I want to help you.”
“How can anybody help me? I’m finished! Ruined!”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “Someone has taken advantage of you and I want you to tell me what you can.”
I don’t know if he thought I was some nincompoop who had been sleeping with her chemistry teacher without understanding the birds and the bees, or what. Or maybe he thought I was deranged. I didn’t know, but the story came tumbling out, broken nose and all. He listened carefully to every word and by the time I was finished recounting the night, he sat back in his leather chair, took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He seemed as old as Methuselah. In the same moment, I knew I had crossed a threshold, leaving my girlhood behind me forever. I was so filled with the injustice of it all that I wanted to die. I was just so incredibly sad.
“If we can establish paternity, Anna, we can send this fellow up the river, you know. Rape is a serious felony.”
“What good would that do?” I twisted the tissue in my hand and then took another, getting angry then.
“The son of a bitch broke your nose, Anna, pardon my French. He raped you and left you pregnant. Think what he might do to the next girl.”
It was too much to think about. “I don’t know,” I said. “How am I ever going to tell my dad? This will kill him!”
“I’ll help you, Anna, and I think you’re going to want someone impartial to help your dad keep a cool head. Listen, I’ve known Douglas Lutz for years and he is an entirely reasonable man.”
“You don’t understand! You don’t know how he is with me! Ever since Momma . . . and the war . . . and my grandmother, oh, my God! What am I going to do?”
“They aren’t stupid, Anna; they know what goes on in the world. Both of them will absolutely realize at once that this is not your fault. Come on, I’ll follow you home.”
All the way home, I crawled into my head, cocooning myself against every possible scenario. What was the worst that could happen? That my father and grandmother would throw me out on the streets? I doubted that. My grandmother maybe, but not Daddy. He loved me and I was sure of it. He would be shocked and angry like I was, but then he would . . . would what? I didn’t want to think about it.
I was grateful to God that Dr. Goodman was behind me. Since there was cause for legal action, it would give Daddy someone calm to think it through with before calling anyone, like the police or a lawyer. Oh, my God, I thought, what if they did that? What if it was in all the papers? What if there was a trial?
Wasn’t it enough that a baby was growing inside of me who I didn’t even know was there? Wasn’t that enough for God to give me to deal with for one night?
Apparently not.
Daddy was on the front steps and saw us arrive. Dr. Goodman turned in the driveway behind me and we got out at almost the same time. Daddy mistook the horror on my face to be news of a terrible disease and his face turned white.
“Hey, Douglas, you got a beer for an old friend?” Dr. Goodman’s words were an attempt to put Daddy at ease and amazingly, Daddy regained his color and composure.
“Of course,” he said. “Come on in.”
We convened at the kitchen table and the silence in the room hung heavy. Daddy popped open two bottles of Beck’s, handing one to Dr. Goodman.
“So what’s the word?” Daddy said.
I started to cry again, putting my face in my hands.
“Anna’s pregnant, Douglas,” Dr. Goodman said, “drugged and raped at her prom by her date.”
There was not a sound to be heard for what seemed to be forever. Then came the questions.
“How far?”
“Ten weeks.”
“Anna’s okay?”
“As far as I can tell.”
They went on and on for a few minutes and then Daddy t
urned to me.
“I’ll murder the son of a bitch with my bare hands,” he said, as though he had said instead Pass the butter.
“You’ll murder who?”
It was Grandmother Violet coming in the room and the demons in her started to dance. She started screaming, ranting and raving like a madwoman, calling me every name in the book. Daddy and Dr. Goodman tried to calm her by explaining it was rape. Rape only drove her insanity to new heights and made her even crazier. The disgrace! How could you? You whore! Why didn’t you fight? What’s wrong with you? They told her I had been drugged, which ratcheted up her volume somewhere near a sound that only dogs can hear. Drugs? Drugs?
At first I thought she was faking it, but she held her head, then both sides of her face, her eyes went up in her head, and she collapsed on the floor. In delayed reaction, Daddy just stood there, catatonic as he usually was when his mother went crazy, but Dr. Goodman rushed to her, held her pulse, and lifted her eyelid.
“Call an ambulance, Douglas; I think she’s had a stroke.”
Holy Mary, Mother of God, I thought, this is my fault. I didn’t know what to do. I walked out the kitchen door and sat on the back steps in the growing darkness, watching the water of Charleston Harbor. I was wishing for the first time in all those years that my mother was alive. I don’t know what she would have said, but she would have known and thought better of me than to call me a whore. I was not a whore.
Sirens came closer. I went back in the house, looked at my grandmother’s ugly twisted face, and I was so angry that I wanted to slap her. When my father and Dr. Goodman left the room to bring the ambulance attendants to her side, I did the most terrible thing I had ever even thought of doing in my entire life. I leaned over her and said in a whisper, “I am not a whore and this is your fault not mine. I hope you die, you mean, old, nasty, nasty bitch.”
She died peacefully a week later. I never felt one shred of guilt. I never knew that I could feel that much resentment toward another human being and it surprised me. Moreover, I had been robbed of my chance for repentance from her. Dead women seldom apologized.
If the nuns were right, my tongue had probably earned about twenty million Frequent Flyer miles to rush my immortal impudent soul to a special torture chamber in Purgatory. It was a great selling point of Catholicism that you could work off sin in this kind of halfway house for the wayward. Even I knew that it would take more than one trip to the confessional to redeem myself with the Lord. It didn’t matter. I would gladly face whatever consequences my Maker had for me. At least I had defended myself.
Her funeral was small and mercifully swift and we hauled her remains in a small procession out to Magnolia Cemetery and buried her with more consideration than she had ever shown me for one minute. Oddly enough, even Daddy seemed relieved by her departure. Once it was clear that she could never make a reasonable recovery I guess he thought death would be preferable to life as her stroke had left her.
Needless to say, I was still pregnant and flipping out. The irony of it all was that the woman who disliked me the most intensely had inadvertently chosen my rapist. This detail wasn’t lost on me or on Daddy. Grandmother Violet had never uttered a word of regret about what she had said about me from the day she had her stroke until she closed her eyes for the last time. Unbelievable. Anyone else’s grandmother would have wept with regret for days; not mine. She blamed me for my pregnancy and for her stroke. My heart hardened stronger than ever toward her because I knew how wrong and dangerous it was for her to blame me. Blaming someone was a serious issue.
The fault was Everett Fairchild’s unconscionable act of violence and my grandmother’s stroke was brought on by her own stupidity. Miss Bible-Thumper didn’t know the first thing about compassion and forgiveness. And, with the lid on her—so to speak—it was time to talk about Everett.
It was the afternoon of the burial. Daddy and I were in the kitchen. Jim and Frannie were helping me put food away. I had told them that morning that I was pregnant and they were understandably stunned. Frannie cried and ranted and Jim was just as upset as we were. They knew everything about me there was to know, especially that I didn’t deserve this.
We were flooded by company that day. As always, to mark the passing of a neighbor or the arrival of one, the whole neighborhood had appeared at our door with cakes, turkeys, hams and casseroles of every description. I couldn’t believe people came with meals to honor Violet, but they did. We wouldn’t have to cook for a very long while. When our friends had dwindled down to just Dr. Goodman, Frannie, and Jim, we all sat down at the table for another piece of cake.
“Do you want some milk?” Frannie asked me.
“Sure,” I said. “I should probably give up Cokes, huh?”
“She knows?” Daddy said. He looked worn out, his face a mixture of sadness and resignation.
“They both do. Jim and Frannie are my best friends, Daddy. They were there, remember?”
“Yes, of course.” Daddy paused, cleared his throat, and said, “We haven’t ever had the opportunity to talk about this, but I want both of you to know how deeply grateful I am for how you helped Anna that night.”
“Sure, Dr. Lutz,” Frannie said. “We had no idea . . .”
“No,” Daddy said, “I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I’m gonna marry her, Dr. Lutz, that is, if you’ll let me,” Jim said.
You could have pushed me off my chair with the flick of a finger, I was so shocked. My face must have turned blood red, because it suddenly felt much warmer. Frannie’s jaw dropped, as did Daddy’s and Dr. Goodman’s.
“I said, sir, that I’d like to marry Anna,” Jim repeated. “This child needs a name and a father. She can’t possibly marry Everett Fairchild and I wouldn’t let her. I’ve loved Anna since we were children and I think I am the best man applying for the job.”
“Jim!” I said. “You know I love you to pieces, but I can’t marry you!”
“Why not?” he said, and stood up.
“Because I don’t want to get married! Besides, you’re my friend! People don’t marry their best friends!”
Daddy cleared his throat and said, “Well, they should.”
Daddy’s remark unleashed a pack of wild dogs in my mind. Was Daddy saying that marrying for love was for fools, that he had been a fool to love Momma, and that I should marry Jim, when he knew perfectly well that Jim was, in all likelihood, a gay man? It wasn’t enough that I was raped and now pregnant, that I couldn’t go to USC, pledge Tri Delt, have boyfriends, and go to dances and football games. Now he wanted me to sign away my life to a man who would never be a traditional husband. Was it because parents couldn’t stand to think about their children having a sex life? All of this so that this baby would have a name? Even at my young age it seemed too much to ask of me. I gathered up my courage to speak.
“Jim? You are so unbelievably generous to make this offer or proposal or whatever it is, but I can’t accept. I just can’t.”
I got up and went to Jim to give him a hug. He hugged me back, took my hand, and led me to the back door, turning to speak to the jury. “Would y’all excuse us for a moment?”
They were still in a stun gun state and nodded their heads in the same way corks bob on water.
Jim walked me out to the yard and said, “Sit.”
I sat on one of the three Adirondack chairs that had been on the lawn since we moved there.
“Okay. Have you considered an abortion?”
“Jesus, Jim! Listen, in the first place, I’m almost three months’ pregnant. Maybe if I had known six weeks ago, I might have thought about that. But I am so stupid, I didn’t even think in my wildest dreams that I could be pregnant! Besides, I can’t go through with something like that. I just can’t. I’m too chicken.”
“Well, I needed to ask that.”
“Jim! Do you realize I didn’t even know I had sex with that bastard? He drugged me, for God’s sake.”
“Good Lord. Somebody needs to beat the shi
t out of that no-good son of a bitch.”
“You already did. Remember?”
“Yeah, well, if I ever have the chance I’ll bust his head wide open like a watermelon.”
“That would be why I have always loved you.”
“And, I will always love you too. Look,” he said, “I’m doing us both a favor. This might be the only chance I’ll ever have in my whole life to call a kid mine. My brother, Paul, is graduating from college next spring and marrying this girl he’s practically living with. She’s got big damn hips like an old brood mare and will probably get pregnant before they cut the cake! Honey, she’s gone go and start spitting out grandchildren for old Miss Trixie and Mr. Jimbo like I don’t know what!” He was snapping his fingers all around himself.
I smiled. Jim was so wonderful and even in a moment of that intensity, he was funny.
He took a deep breath and kneeled down in front of me. His face was very serious and he spoke quietly. “I would love to have a child, Anna. I would also love not to be disinherited from my father’s will, okay?”
I picked my cuticles and looked at the ground. “Jim, you know this isn’t right. People don’t get married so they can inherit money.”
“Since when? Are you kidding me? Read your history! People marry for every reason in the world! Don’t you see? If my father knew I sang Judy Garland songs in the shower, he’d kick my pretty ass all over downtown Charleston and then some!”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“What if what doesn’t work? Listen, we can go to the College of Charleston. My parents will help us. My mother will adore you and the baby! Jesus, girl, you’d think I was asking you to lie down in front of a speeding Mack truck! Come on, say yes.”