Broken Vessels Read online

  I have outgrown that, and I believe my sons have too. We talk of a man we know who one morning shaved the beard he had worn for years and went downstairs for breakfast with the family and no one noticed; and of a woman I know, who for over twenty years was the only cigarette smoker in her family, and her husband and several children wanted her to stop, and teased her, begged her, scolded her; finally she did stop, and neither her husband nor her children were aware of this, and at dinner after her first week without a cigarette she finally told them. And my sons and I are able now to laugh, to say: No wonder those bullies beat us up; they should have. We know now that if we had fought the first bully who harassed us, we would have saved ourselves years of torment.

  Because of all this, and I hope a sense of justice as well, I become enraged whenever I see the strong bullying the weak. And when the weak one is a female, my rage is deeper. Because with girls and women, it is all a matter of size. Few women, no matter how courageous, can defeat a man in physical combat, if both she and he are normally made. So what was — or still is — in the hearts of those snakes who watched while Adam beat Eve, Nick pushed and struck and choked young Jan?

  I understand them less than I understand Nick, and I understand very little about him, or about the young woman who was with him that night, his girlfriend who not only continued to be his girlfriend after his assault on Jan, but was in the courtroom in December, waiting to take the stand and commit perjury. But I can recognize Nick’s rage, and his girlfriend’s loyalty. The unrecognizable emotion, for me, is whatever stirred and churned inside the ones who watched. It was not fear that held them; they were Nick’s friends.

  Because these punks abound, I have in the trunk of the car an axe handle. Two autumns earlier, in 1982, also at the Midway Pizza and Sub, some of these snakes beat up students from the college where I used to work. The students were foreigners, and I believe there were three of them. The beating was on a Saturday night, and I heard about it the next afternoon, and Sunday night I lay awake until eight o’clock in the morning. The anger and pain that turned my bed into a cage, and changed the silence of night into the imagined sounds of fists and feet striking flesh and bone, had nothing to do with townies and students. I had no such loyalties; I often told students that my children were townies, and so was I. Nor was I disturbed because the students were foreign; if they had been Samoans — I suppose there are small ones but I have never seen one — or Japanese sumo wrestlers, or if they had been well-built young men from any nation; or, lacking the physiques, if they had possessed that certain earned or sometimes feigned aura that deters bullies, they would have simply gone into the place and bought their food and returned to the campus. These Middle Eastern students on that warm Saturday night were small; the bullies assaulted in a pack and beat them at will, beat them until none of the students could rise from the sidewalk.

  I did not spend all of that long Sunday night imagining the beating. The Midway is on the main street of Haverhill, and is between the bar where a poet and I used to go for nightcaps, and the street where we lived. So during much of that night I thought of Mike and myself driving home after our beers and seeing the punks again, with victims or a victim. What would we do, since we had no choice but to get out of the car and force a gang to cease and desist?

  Because of horrors inflicted on too many women I love, I carry a licensed handgun when I go with a woman to Boston. Lately, because one is liable now in America to turn a street corner and walk into lethal violence whose target is of either gender, and of any age — a small child, an old woman or man — I have begun to carry a gun whenever I go to Boston. As much as I have thought about it, I still believe I do not carry it for myself, would not even use it to protect myself, except from death. This is not bravery; I simply don’t care if someone takes my money, and don’t particularly care if someone decides to pound me about the head and shoulders. In either case, I would not resort to a gun. There is nothing wrong with taking flight, if you are the only target. On that insomniac night in the fall of 1982 I decided I would not carry a gun to my neighborhood bar; that if I felt a need to do that, it was time to move to Canada.

  So I considered weapons. I wanted one I could keep in the trunk of the Subaru, one that I would use only to prevent or try to stop local violence. I suppose I believe that nearly always we are unprepared: we have forgotten first-aid training, we don’t know where the phone is, we are alone and weaponless and have no skills in what are strangely called the martial arts, or in boxing (an underrated skill: in a bar when I was in high school I saw a state champion high-school boxer back down four punks whose belligerence turned to obsequiousness when they heard his name; they knew his speed and power, knew their numbers only meant that he would knock four of them to the floor, rather than just one); so I also believe that many — not enough, but many — newspaper stories we read about people doing nothing while another human being is in trouble are stories not about apathy but about not knowing what to do, and the stasis of fear that accompanies that condition. I suppose I believe, too, that if you are prepared, you will not suddenly be in the midst of trouble. If you know what to do when someone has an epileptic seizure (I learned one afternoon in Haverhill, frightening on-the-job training that left me in near shock), and have in your purse or pocket a tongue depressor, then someone will suffer a seizure out of your field of vision, standing some three blocks away in a movie line. If this means I believe in luck, then it follows that I believe in bad luck more than good. The optimism in this is the belief that if you are prepared, you will not be called upon, and can go about your life in peace.

  I quickly discarded the idea of a knife. I carry one anyway, as I have in my pocket since boyhood, and for the same reason: every boy had a knife. I also carry it for the few times when I need to open a package, or slice cheese or apples outside of a house. In Marine officer candidate training, a very quick and graceful sergeant taught us to fight with knives, and to fight unarmed against one. But only after the admonishment: If anyone ever pulls a knife on you, run. Besides, drawing a knife on a pack of punks is a weak defensive measure; it is only effective if you use it very quickly and seriously and therefore dangerously: you must attack human flesh with a blade. I only wanted a defensive weapon. I discarded, too, the next object that came to mind: a baseball bat. That heavy end could cause a concussion, fracture a skull. Then I remembered the pugil stick: a round wooden pole with large cylindrical pads on both ends. We used it in the Marines to practice bayonet fighting; we wore football helmets, and learned to use the rifle and bayonet as a boxer uses his fists: jabs, crosses, uppercuts, hooks, the butt of the rifle serving as one fighting end, the bayonet as the other. So an axe handle: light wood that I could grasp at its middle, using either end on noses, mouths, jaws, and so forth, and with little danger of inflicting serious injury but with the probability of slowing down and finally taking the fight out of these bullies who do not like to fight anyway. Once I decided on the weapon I knew I would never have to use it. That Monday afternoon I bought it at a local hardware store and when the young man rang up the sale he said: “That reminds me of a movie. I can’t remember which one.”

  “Walking Tall,” I said, and put it in the trunk where for two years it stayed, losing its brightness, moistening, drying, collecting dust. I forgot it was there, save when I stacked suitcases on it, or shoved it aside to make room for an ice chest.

  I remembered it at once on that Sunday night nearly two years later. I was alone at the bar, talking to the bartender and some regulars, and I left at eleven o’clock to watch the baseball news at eleven-fifteen. In Yankee Stadium that afternoon the Red Sox had won, Boyd had pitched, Rice had homered, and I wanted to see the highlights. I was still in second gear when I saw them: a crowd on the right side of the street, beyond the sidewalk; they were in a semicircle, watching something at the drugstore wall. I turned the car toward them, drove it to the curb, and brightened the headlights. Some of the punks turned to the light. Past their face
s I saw what they were watching: a tall young punk holding a sobbing and screaming girl; he was pushing her back and head against a brick wall, pulling her forward, pushing her again and again. I wanted my sons: my two big justice-seeking sons. I got out of the car, leaving the lights on, went back to the trunk, picked up the axe handle, returned to the front of the car and stood in the lights. Some of the punks shouted at me to go mind my own fucking business. That line strikes me still: my business, while Jan’s back and head were striking a brick wall. I told them I wanted the girl left alone. There was more shouting, and Nick let go of Jan, who fled down the street. He ran after her, caught her by the post office, and I heard her sobbing and yelling. Then Nick came toward me. He stood close and yelled at me and I asked him why a man his size was hitting a woman. With a querulous nuance in his rage, he shouted that she had thrown a drink on his car, even on the seat. Then I saw the cruiser stopping across the street and an officer coming out of the passenger side and walking toward us and I told Nick a police officer was coming up behind him. The officer dispersed the punks and listened to Nick and me telling our stories, while the driver of the cruiser drove diagonally across the street, into the opposite lane, his blue lights flashing, and stopped beside us. I leaned into his window. Beyond him, in the passenger seat, was Jan. She was weeping into the palms of her hands. I gave the officer my name, address, phone number, and told Jan I would be a witness in court, then drove home and saw Boyd pitching and Rice hitting a home run.

  Jan or her mother or sometimes both of them, passing the phone between them, called me during the next few weeks, to let me know what they were doing about the assault and battery charges against Nick, and the date of the pre-trial hearing before the magistrate. They did not have a telephone in their home. They had a very old car. Jan was fifteen; by the date of the trial in December she was sixteen and had left high school and enrolled in a school for beauticians. An older brother lived at home with them. The father lived in Lawrence, some fifteen or twenty minutes away, but was no longer a father; neither Jan nor her mother ever mentioned him and he was not at the trial, where I learned of his existence on earth from Jan’s maternal grandmother.

  On the Sunday night of her beating Jan had walked from her home to Bradford Square: two blocks of shops for pizza, hamburgers, roast beef, and the bar where I was a regular. She was to meet Nick at the Midway Pizza and Sub. But when she walked into that small brightly lit place where teenagers ate pizza and drank soft drinks and smoked cigarettes, Nick was with another girl; perhaps she was a young woman. At the trial she looked nineteen or twenty, but she was dressed, made-up, and bejeweled as for a Saturday night date, so I could not guess her age. Jan believed Nick was her boyfriend. When she saw him in the booth with the blonde instead of a space beside him for her, she went to the counter and bought a paper cup of punch, whatever that may be; then she asked Nick to come outside. They quarreled; they had a date but he was with someone else. Then she tossed her punch onto his car and some went through the window, where gravity pulled it to his upholstery. His car was new, devoutly cared for, American. He attacked her: pushing, hitting, and once he held her over a park bench: pressing her back down across the back of the bench, he choked her with both of his hands. He is a tall creature and his hands are not small and I imagine they were very strong as they squeezed Jan’s throat.

  That night the two officers in the cruiser drove Jan to her home, only a few blocks away; her mother took her to Hale Hospital in Haverhill, where they treated and recorded her bruises and abrasions. On Monday Jan’s mother drove her to the Essex County Court House in Haverhill, and Jan pressed charges. Her mother told me on one of the calls from a pay phone that she had discovered, after Nick beat Jan, that he was twenty-one years old; she said if she had known this she would not have allowed Jan to see him.

  The magistrate’s hearing was in a small office at the court house, and while we waited I met Jan’s mother and, for the first time, saw Jan: not from a distance, screaming and crying, as Nick pushed her against bricks, and not weeping into her hands in the light of the cruiser. That morning she was anxious, neatly dressed, and lovely, with long soft blonde hair. I offered her a cigarette and we smoked and waited until a tall stocky officer in plain clothes called us into the small room. The magistrate, holding an unlit but recently smoked cigar, sat behind a table; Nick sat beside him: tall and handsome, and conscious of his looks. Swagger was in his face, his perfectly combed-back dark hair, his smooth shave. His dark eyes were interesting: they were not wary or attentive or humble; they were intense and angry, the eyes of a man unjustly treated. Jan sat opposite the magistrate, her mother opposite Nick, and I stood behind Jan and the officer stood behind Nick. The magistrate asked Jan if I were a relative or close friend; she said she had never seen me until that Sunday night. This is why I was her only witness, on the advice of the young lawyer from the district attorney’s office: her other witnesses were friends, two girls, the only people who had tried to stop Nick. All males at the Midway Pizza and Sub were Nick’s friends. The magistrate asked Jan for her story; she was nervous, but she had good control, and told the story calmly, chronologically, until she reached the moment when Nick attacked her. He loudly interrupted, said she was lying, and the magistrate turned to him and said: “Shut up. You’ll get your turn.”

  Then he asked Jan to go on with her story and when she finished, Nick started, his voice rising: it was all a lie, he had done nothing, he — The magistrate said: “Did you touch her?”

  Nick lowered his voice: “I touched her jacket.”

  The magistrate slapped the table, said: “Assault and battery; tell it to the judge,” and dismissed us.

  On a Friday morning in December my wife and I went to the trial. My wife sat in the rear and I sat beside Jan and her mother and grandmother. I had forgotten to borrow a necktie but I wore a jacket and my one pair of winter slacks and my wife had trimmed my hair. Make friends with the children of Mammon. As a man said to me once: There are seven Boston women dead because they believed in the American idea of respectability: they let the Boston Strangler into their homes; he always dressed well. Nick sat at a table with his lawyer, near the judge’s bench, and he wore a dark three-piece suit. His girlfriend, his only witness, sat to our right, across the aisle from our benches. During the other cases we watched, I whispered to Jan, again and again, that she need not worry. She was afraid of speaking from the stand, she was afraid Nick would be found not guilty (“I’m afraid we’ll lose,” she said), and her mother was angry because the assistant district attorney did not have and had never seen the hospital records showing what Nick had done to Jan back in the warmth of the baseball season’s final days. That young lawyer had also waited until less than an hour before we entered the court room to ask me what I had seen Nick do to Jan.

  She took the stand first, stood with a good posture, a raised face looking directly at the clerk as she swore to tell the truth, with that anachronistic oath, the truth itself an anachronism in the land, something to be searched for by archaeologists of the human heart, the saints Dorothy Day said again and again we must have in this country. Then The Judge did something strange: he explained to Jan the Fifth Amendment. Then he said there were counter charges arising in the case. I left my seat and crossed the aisle and sat at the rail, behind a young lawyer, a friend of mine; he was on the other side of the flimsy spoked wall, the side reserved for justice. I asked him what The Judge was doing.

  “I think he’s going to throw out the case,” he said.

  “Throw it out?”

  “That’s why he’s warning her about what to admit on the stand.”

  “Oh my God.”

  And The Judge was indeed warning Jan about charges of malicious damage of property and assault with a knife. As she watched him and listened, her face flushed: in confusion, and probably in the knowledge that all morning she had been right, as we waited through the other cases; that during the months since her beating she had been right: she w
ould not win. She would lose because she was bound to, as she was bound to be hurt when a twenty-one-year-old male attacked her. Oh, but she was good. I doubt that she will ever recall how good she was, because the morning was so horrible for her. I hope she can. The assistant district attorney asked: “What were you doing while the defendant held you over the back of the park bench and strangled you?”

  Standing up there, she looked down at his face and said: “I was trying to breathe.”

  We have not made a country where there is a lot of room for Jan and people like her to breathe. I believe The Judge threw out the case because Jan was a girl (and now, God willing, a woman, alive on the earth, with that morning in court and the night of her beating and the time between them still part of her); and because the judge is old, and tired of people and their continual pain before his bench, and because Jan is not, as the phrase goes, from a prominent family. I will never believe that if her family were wealthy he would have done to her what he did. For Nick was and is a punk, and the large officer at the magistrate’s hearing said to me after the magistrate sent the case to court: Now we’ve got him.

  I did not get to the stand. The Judge stopped Jan and the prosecuting attorney and sent Jan back to her seat, with her mother and grandmother. I still sat across the aisle from them, behind my lawyer friend, asking him what was happening now, what the fuck was happening now? Because The Judge called the defense and the prosecution to the bench and spoke to them, and my friend said: “It’s all over, he’s throwing it out.”