I was a prostitute. Oh, how banal to be crazy. Or maybe just banal being me. What could be more banal than having been seduced by your own father and then going around being ‘ scarred ’ by it for ever? You see, I kept thinking all the while, ‘ There ’ s no need for me to be behaving in this way. There is no need to be acting crazy—and there never was. There is no need to be running away to the North Pole. I ’ m just pretending. All I have to do to stop is to stop. ’ I would remember my aunts telling me, if I so much as uttered a whimper in objection to anything: ‘ Pull yourself together, Lydia, mind over matter. ’ Well, it couldn ’ t be that I was going to waste my life defying those two, could it? Because making myself their victim was sillier even than continuing to allow myself to be my father ’ s. There I sat in the movies in Canada, with all these expressions I used to hate so, going through my head, hut making perfect sense. Pull yourself together, Lydia. Mind over matter, Lydia. You can ’ t cry over spilled milk, Lydia. If you don ’ t succeed, Lydia—and you don ’ t—try, try again. Nothing could have been clearer to me than that sitting in the movies in Winnipeg was as senseless as anything I could do if I ever hoped to save Monica from her father. I could only conclude that I didn ’ t want t o save her from him. Dr. Ru the r ford now tells me that that was exactly the case. Not that it requires a trained therapist to see through somebody like me. How did I get back to Chicago? According to Dr. Rutherford, by accomplishing what I set out to do. I was staying in a two-dollar-a-night hotel on what turned out to be Winnipeg ’ s skid row. As if Lydia didn ’ t know, says Dr. Rutherford. The third morning that I came down to pay for the room, the desk clerk asked me if I wanted to pick up some easy cash. I could make a lot of money posing for pictures, especially if I was blonde all over. I began to howl. He called a policeman, and the policeman called a doctor, and eventually somehow they got me home. And that ’ s how I managed to rid myself of my daughter. You would have thought it would have been simpler to drown her in the bathtub. ”
To say that I was drawn to her story because it was so lurid is only the half of it: there was the way the tale was told. Lydia ’ s easy, familiar, even cozy manner with misery, her droll acceptance of her own madness, grea tly increased the story ’ s appeal— or, to put it another way, did much to calm whatever fears one might expect an inexperienced young man of a conventional background to have about a woman bearing such a ravaged past. Who would call “ crazy ” a woman who spoke with such detachment of her history of craziness? Who could find evidence of impulses toward suicide and homicide in a rhetorical style so untainted by rage or vengeful wrath? No, no, this was someone who had experienced her experience, who had been deepened by all that misery. A decidedly ordinary looking person, a pretty little American blonde with a face like a million others, she had, without benefit of books or teachers, mobilized every ounce of her intelligence to produce a kind of wisdom about herself. For surely it required wisdom to recite, calmly and with a mild, even forgiving irony, such a ghastly narrative of ill luck and injustice. You had to be as cruelly simpleminded as Ketterer himself, I thought, not to appreciate the moral triumph this represented—or else you just had to be someone other than me.
I met the woman with whom I was to ruin my life only a few months after arriving back in Chicago in the fall of 1956, following a premature discharge from the army. I was just short of twenty-four, held a master ’ s degree in literature, and prior to my induction into the service had been invited to return to the College after my discharge as an instructor in the English composition program. Under any circumstances my parents would have been
To say that I was drawn to her story because it was so lurid is only the half of it: there was the way the tale was told. Lydia ’ s easy, familiar, even cozy manner with misery, her droll acceptance of her own madness, grea tly increased the story ’ s appeal— or, to put it another way, did much to calm whatever fears one might expect an inexperienced young man of a conventional background to have about a woman bearing such a ravaged past. Who would call “ crazy ” a woman who spoke with such detachment of her history of craziness? Who could find evidence of impulses toward suicide and homicide in a rhetorical style so untainted by rage or vengeful wrath? No, no, this was someone who had experienced her experience, who had been deepened by all that misery. A decidedly ordinary looking person, a pretty little American blonde with a face like a million others, she had, without benefit of books or teachers, mobilized every ounce of her intelligence to produce a kind of wisdom about herself. For surely it required wisdom to recite, calmly and with a mild, even forgiving irony, such a ghastly narrative of ill luck and injustice. You had to be as cruelly simpleminded as Ketterer himself, I thought, not to appreciate the moral triumph this represented—or else you just had to be someone other than me.
I met the woman with whom I was to ruin my life only a few months after arriving back in Chicago in the fall of 1956, following a premature discharge from the army. I was just short of twenty-four, held a master ’ s degree in literature, and prior to my induction into the service had been invited to return to the College after my discharge as an instructor in the English composition program. Under any circumstances my parents would have been
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