The much-awaited part four. All of parts 1 ,2, and 3 had been written in a first draft a year or so ago, at the request of “Carol” who now goes by another name. I was only a few paragraphs into this installment when I bogged down in remembered pain and mental blocks. Now, thanks to Xanga and your encouragement, I’ve had the impetus to plow through the blocks and tell this much more of my story. Thanks, guys. I think “Carol” will appreciate it.
The blocky little red brick jail had two cells, accessed by a corridor along one side. Mine was the second cell, and the wall separating it from the corridor had a hole in its masonry a foot or so above the floor and about big enough to have gotten my head stuck in if I had tried to stick it into there. The other cell was occupied by two young men who had been arrested for joy riding. They had knocked the hole in the wall with part of the lower bunk from my cell, but their escape attempt had been foiled, and they had been moved to the other, more secure, cell.
We had windows with bars but no glass. It was early January, with blustery winds and a few snow flurries. The jailer gave me two wool blankets and my new jacket. The boys next door and I exchanged crime stories long into the night, as I perched, huddled on the top bunk, knees to chest and wrapped in blankets. The boys said that Jesse James had once been a prisoner in this very building. Sleep did not come easy, but chills and goose bumps did. The arrest, mug shots, fingerprints, paperwork and all, had gotten me to the jail too late for the cold roast beef sandwiches that were every day‘s supper. I did get my cold fried egg sandwich for breakfast the next day, though.
I spent three nights and two days there with my breasts hard and leaking, before a U.S. Marshal came in with two sheriff’s deputies, one male and one female, who had come from Wichita to transport us back. In a court appearance on January 3, 1963, I had waived extradition. I can date it from my recall of the conversation I had with the judge. He asked me how old my baby was, and I answered, “twelve days.”
I had already been visited by a Special Agent of the FBI while I sat in a police car waiting to transport my girls to their foster home in Waynesville the evening of the arrest. He was a really nice man with a sense of humor. He had been called in because his surname was the same as my first husband’s and his wife’s name was Kathy. He heard the radio chatter of the local cops and wondered how it came to be that they had arrested his wife. He was greatly relieved to learn that it was a case of mistaken identity.
The two young sheriff’s deputies from Sedgwick County were openly bemused when they picked me up. I was barely eighteen and looked even younger. My voice was that of a child, high and soft. I was placed in leg irons, manacled, and the manacles were shackled to a wide leather belt locked around my waist. The woman apologized and explained all the way through the procedure: it was regulations when transporting prisoners.
We drove up on the hillside in town to pick up my girls. Marie was clingy and very quiet. Carol seemed hungry, and after she nursed she went right to sleep.
The next stop was the jail in Springfield where Danny and Gary were held. With them in the marshal’s car, a sedan, we were packed pretty tight. Marie tried to find a comfortable spot on someone’s lap, and then gave up and stretched out on the window ledge behind the back seat.
We stopped only once that I recall, on the drive back to Wichita. It was a small cafe. With Gary, Danny, and the three cops, I shuffled in my shackles into the cafe, Marie clinging to my skirt and Carol clumsily held in my manacled arms. I don’t think I had been considering my situation much. I was numb, walking in a living nightmare. The ride in the packed car, caring for the girls, speaking in whispers to Gary and listening to the joking conversation of the cops, and sometimes joining in…that had been keeping my mind occupied. My first real clue to how I must have looked as I stood there, was in the eyes of the waitress in that cafe. I saw shock and pity on her face. She was solicitous and sympathetic. I think if we had made some move, she might have aided us in an escape.
I can imagine how we looked. Gary was the oldest, but he, just as Danny and I, appeared young for his age. Gary kept his cool, seeming more resigned than anything else. Being the most con-wise of us all, he must have realized all along the risks we were taking, and the small window of time we had to get out of the country before we were caught. His demeanor showed none of the fear that was in Danny’s eyes, and which I know I must have been showing. Gary was doing his best to comfort Marie and me. I was trying to maintain my composure to keep from alarming my girls. I was hanging onto Carol every minute that I could and was in a state of shock as much from having spent those days separated from my girls, as from any anticipation of what was coming next. When I went to the rest room, Gary cradled the baby in his shackled arms and waited until I returned to start eating his burger.
My hamburger cooled while I got Marie fed, changed Carol’s diaper and went to the toilet. I took a few bites, but couldn’t stomach the grease and the congealed fries. Every time I looked up, the waitress was hovering, looking at us. I saw tears in her eyes as we were led back out to the car to resume the trip. I guess she must have grown up with the same sort of folk heroes I did.
We got to Wichita after dark. I didn’t know the time. We parked at the county building and my girls went with the female deputy while Gary, Danny and I were hustled into an elevator. Mug shots and fingerprints again, and then I was given a shapeless dress too big for me and put in the women’s dormitory. There were only two other women there, one middle aged and the other probably in her twenties.
They were thoughtful and curious, asking me what I’d been arrested for and telling me what I could expect to happen at my arraignment the next day. The younger of them wanted to help me shampoo and set my hair for my court appearance, and I let her. We had to finish the job after lights out, by the night light shining in from the corridor. She had short hair and masculine mannerisms, and I was convinced she was a Lesbian, something I‘d heard of but never to my knowledge encountered in the flesh. I was nervous, but she was sweet and maternal in her attention to me. I had held in my tears through the entire long ride across the prairie, but when the doors clanged shut there, I lost it. I was weeping off and on the whole night, and both of my cellmates were doing their best to calm and reassure me.
My appearance in court the next day was handled in the routinely perfunctory way all such things are done. Just one in a long series of such events for the judge, lawyers, clerks and bailiffs, it was a first for me, and my future was in the balance there. I was so frightened I could barely speak. My voice squeaked and quavered. The attorney who had been appointed for me told me that my girls were in a foster home. My mother was there at the courthouse, and when I was released on bail, she took me to a social worker’s office where my daughters were returned to me.
It had been arranged that Marie, Carol and I would move in with Gary’s mother. Mrs. Metzger was head nurse on a ward at one of the Wichita hospitals. I was nervous and ill at ease in her company. I might not have been relaxed anywhere at such a time, but her immaculate house full of antiques and doilies was also full of hazards for Marie, and I was always on the alert lest she break one of the numerous porcelain figurines or glass animals. Most unnerving of all was the mynah bird who spoke often, and usually in Gary’s voice. The bird would holler, “Hi there!” in my lover’s affectionate tones, and my heart would skip a beat.
We had been there a few days when Marie first showed the telltale spots of chicken pox. Her fever had just peaked and begun to wane when Carol and I started showing symptoms. Marie had surely contracted it from a kid in the Waynesville foster home and given it to us. I’d had chicken pox before, but wasn’t surprised to have it again, having had measles and mumps multiple times as well. I was miserable with fever, headache and itches I knew I wasn’t supposed to scratch. We cut Marie’s and Carol’s fingernails short and kept the baby’s hands covered with the sleeves of her long-tailed, drawstring gowns.
One evening while all three of us were sick, Gary’s mother, my mother and I had a kitchen conversation about the realities of my situation. I had been given three months to pay a few hundred dollars in restitution on the bad checks. Even if I continued to freeload at Mrs. Metzger’s, if I had to pay a babysitter, two jobs at the wages I could hope for probably wouldn’t be enough. They thought I should put the girls in a foster home. I caved.
Mama had called a bail bondsman she knew as a regular customer in a cafe where she had worked. Bill did her a favor and bailed me out on credit, an extremely rare occurrence that I didn’t properly understand or appreciate at the time. I was allowed to work off the fee as a sort of human answering machine and file clerk. His office was a reclining chair in front of the TV in his living room. His family wandered in and out, and when he had to go out to get some poor guy out of the clink, Bill left me in charge to hold the fort.
When I got there, his “files” were in a roughly chronological pile on an end table beside his recliner. Each slip was in triplicate. I talked him into finding me two shoe boxes, and I created a filing system, with one copy of each bail slip in chronological order by appearance date in one box, and another in alphabetical order in the other, and the third back in it’s original stack at his elbow, in the order in which it had been received. The Phantom Virgo strikes again.
After I had worked off my debt, Bill offered me a very reasonable salary to stay on, but I found his living room with its red flocked wallpaper and heavy drapes always pulled across the windows oppressive. There was no chance of tips or advancement. The steady stream of hookers, burglars, lawyers and assorted others through the living room really creeped me out. If I hadn’t been such a timid innocent, and in such desperate immediate need of money, this could have been a great career move, but I opted to get another food service job. Bill found me one, at Anthony’s Steak House, a spaghetti joint on Highway 81 north of town, where the specialty was southern fried chicken.
I started on the midnight shift. At night, most of our customers were city cops and sheriff’s patrol deputies, with the occasional hooker getting in out of the weather, and a flood of drunks when the bars closed down. I knew I’d make better tips on the day shift, and when a swing shift car-hop job came up at a drive-in on the other end of town, I talked Anthony into letting me move to days so I could do both jobs.
I paid off my restitution and found an apartment on Nims a couple of blocks from the Riverside Park Zoo. I could hear the lions roar if a window was open. I wasn’t allowed to correspond with Gary, but occasionally he managed somehow to get a message out to me. I developed an interest in the criminal justice system and prison reform.
Mama had found a steady job and moved in with me because my place was bigger than Granny’s and she could help me with the rent so I could work toward getting my girls back. I don’t think I had any idea the fragile emotional state I was in until one night I came home from work around 2 AM and found a letter from Al. All the envelope contained was a studio portrait I’d had made for him in happier times. He had drawn devil’s horns, a beard and mustache, warts, scars and thought balloons on it–ugliness and hateful words. I started crying, not the quiet weeping I’d been doing almost daily, but boo-hooing and sobs, beating my fists on sofa cushions.
I wanted to go walk off the emotional storm, stroll through the deserted zoo pathways, swing on a swing in the park. Mama, concerned, I suppose, about my hysterical state, blocked the door and would not let me out. I shoved her aside and went for a walk. I don’t know what hysterical story she told the cops when she called them. I had quieted and was just walking, one foot in front of the other, when the patrol car pulled up and they called me over. They took me to St. Francis Hospital where I was admitted to the psychiatric ward for observation.
I met some wonderful women there. This was the era when women were often deemed “hysterical” and locked up if they failed to maintain a stoical attitude through the stresses of their lives. The “nervous breakdown” was an invention of that time, a broad term to cover numerous manifestations of emotional trauma. My first friend in the loony bin was Mother Catherine, head of a convent in Oklahoma City, who had lost it somehow and been sent here for care. She loved pinochle and taught me to play.
Mother Catherine also loved bananas. We bet bananas. Each of us got a banana with our breakfast cereal every day, and not everyone ate hers. Even if one was hungry and loved bananas, there were good reasons for leaving them intact. Bananas in various stages of ripeness and wear became coin of our strange tiny realm. They were exchanged for other foods, various services such as storytelling, reading aloud, hairdressing, etc., and were won and lost in card games, at Monopoly, dominoes and such. Mother C wanted to own them all. I can see in my mind’s eye her lopsided grin as she peeled one that was just about ‘round the bend, soft and black, no longer useful as cash, while two more stuck out of her apron pocket.
Another memorable one there was Patsy, my roommate. Three times a week she got ECT, electro-convulsive therapy, “shock treatments”, the electronic lobotomy. She would shuffle into our room after a treatment, look around blankly, say, “Who are you?” and “What‘s my name?” as she read the name tags on our closet doors. Then she would open a closet and ask if those were her clothes. Sometimes she got it right, sometimes it was my closet. Over the next few days she’d get a little of her memory back and talk about the boy her parents didn’t want her to marry, and then she’d go for another treatment and get lost again.
I’d been there a few weeks and taken all their tests and been a good patient. I kept asking when I could go home and got no answers. One day I was called to the shrink’s office and my mother was there. They told me they didn’t know how long I would be in the hospital and that I needed to make some arrangements for my girls. A social worker had talked to Marie and determined it would be in her best interests to be with me when I was well enough to be released. I balked when they said I should give Carol up for adoption, but after a session of Mama’s tears and the psychiatrist’s scolding and lecturing, I caved again. I signed the surrender for adoption.
The next day, I was released from the hospital.
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