Chapter 15 The Fiscal Value of a Human Life
The Fiscal Value of a Human Life
My new roommate, Tina Hawthorne from Jericho, Vermont, was a little cowed by the idea that I had spent the last year living in Manhattan while working at a glamorous travel magazine.
She was also unnerved by the amount of marijuana I smoked and the way I had found, within days of arriving in Northampton, an older student who could sell me cocaine and tabs of LSD.
(In the end, I dropped acid only once that autumn.
It was at a Bonnie Raitt concert at UMass Amherst, and most of the time I was merely fascinated by how tiny the singer seemed on the stage.
Also, when I returned to Smith, I discovered that I had peed my pants during the concert.
I must have been a treasure that night riding back to my own campus on one of the free buses that linked the five colleges in that corner of western Massachusetts.)
Tina was a virgin who drank beer and—when she was feeling sophisticated—wine, and she was sure I was going to get us both arrested someday because of the amount of weed and coke that was always in our room.
It was clear that she disapproved of me, appalled that one night soon after arriving at college I was doing LSD at a country rock concert.
She had hoped when we met we’d be friends; it was clear before the autumn leaves were gone we never would be.
Of course, she would also be the person who would introduce me to my husband.
Capen House was having a mixer in which boys from Amherst, coeducational barely a half decade by then, could join us girls in rooms that were better lit than the Amherst fraternities and didn’t smell like bad beer (the first floors), filthy socks (the second), and urinals (the basements).
It was a Friday evening in October. I was not unhappy to be there at the party, but I had come downstairs for it largely because I was keeping Tina company: a wing woman, if you will.
As if I were a leopard on the hunt, however, I spotted the one older man in the room instantly.
I pegged him for mid-thirties based on the deep lines around dark eyes that exuded world-weariness like cologne.
He was wearing a denim shirt that didn’t hide the fact he was seriously buffed, and he had thicker hair than I did, a creosote mane that he wore in a ponytail.
He looked more like a bartender than a professor, but I still made the mistake of supposing he taught at the college.
Why else would he be here? He was drinking wine, while almost everyone else was at the punch bowl or the keg.
In my experience, the idea that he was too old for the girls in the room had never precluded a man from casting his line into those waters.
He was that “youngish” male prof on his own sort of prowl.
He hadn’t noticed me, however, and I was just buzzed enough to contemplate approaching him when my roommate shocked me by running over to him first, throwing her arms around his waist, and standing on her toes to plant one hell of a smack on his cheek.
“Ethan!” she cooed. “You actually came!”
I didn’t hear what he said back and shambled over.
“Ethan, this is my roommate, Mira Winston. She’s from some little place outside New York City.
Mira, this is one of my older brother’s best friends from high school, Ethan Pomerleau.
He’s like an uncle to me. No, he’s better than an uncle, because he doesn’t say embarrassing things at the Thanksgiving dinner table. ”
“Have I ever been at your Thanksgiving dinner table?” he asked.
“You’ve been at the house on Thanksgiving Day.”
“That I have. Picking up your brother.”
“Mira, Ethan is a freshman at Amherst.”
I must have looked confused. He shrugged, a little embarrassed. “Yeah, I know. I’m older than the rest of the class,” he said sheepishly. “I’m here because, well, Tina insisted I come tonight, and so I thought I’d see how she’s doing.”
“Not here to meet girls, eh?”
“Uh, no.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-nine.”
“That’s not so old,” I said. Good God, he was a child compared to the other men I had slept with. Still, I was surprised: he looked older to me than he was.
“Oh, next to all of you? It is.”
“Why are you only starting college now?”
“Vietnam.”
This is what I mean about how I won the birth lottery, a windfall I threw away with cavalier negligence: I had never met a Vietnam veteran because of the suburb in which I had been cosseted.
And so it took a moment for the reason to register, and I asked, processing it slowly and stupidly, “What do you mean? You were there?”
Tina smiled kindly at me and rolled her eyes. “Yes, Ethan was there. Was it 1968 and 1969?” she asked him.
“So close,” he corrected her. “It was 1969 and 1970.”
Most of what I knew about the Vietnam War I knew from movies, of which there had been a lot the past two years: Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and that summer’s Apocalypse Now. I’d seen them all because, unlike Animal House, no one is killed by a golf ball.
“And you were a soldier?” I asked, as if I hadn’t heard. I couldn’t comprehend the idea that he might have been in combat.
“I was.”
“What were you doing for the last nine years?”
“Let’s see: I worked on my uncle’s dairy farm in Vermont. I worked with Tina’s brother here at a little brewery in Burlington. I worked for a nursery—plants, not people—in Massachusetts. I worked for a builder, banging up walls and hanging Sheetrock. And I painted houses.”
“What did you do in Vietnam?”
He shrugged. “Drank beer. Played beach volleyball. Marveled at how Godzilla-like big the mosquitoes were.”
I was relieved. He hadn’t answered my question exactly, but it didn’t sound like he had either been in harm’s way himself or was massacring children in places like My Lai.
Quickly, however, Tina punched him good-naturedly on the arm and said, “He’s being modest. Ethan was one of those guys in the choppers who’d land in a… what do you call them?”
“Hot zones,” he answered evenly.
“Hot zones,” she went on, “jumping out of the helicopter with a machine gun and protecting everyone while they rounded up the wounded. He was one of the guys who actually—and I am not making this up—used to sit on their helmets in the helicopters so the Vietnamese shooting up at them from the ground wouldn’t shoot off their you-know-whats. ”
Please remember I was stoned when I tell you what I asked him next. “Did you ever kill anyone?”
“I suppose so, yes. You?”
“As a matter of fact,” I admitted, “I have.”
And that, for the record, was my husband’s and my meet-cute.
I had told Tina about Kenny Foster only days earlier.
And I had for the simple reason that it was all getting too much for me and I needed to talk to someone and she was my roommate and would have to do.
And the reason I needed to talk was because the parameters of, at least, the civil case had now come fully into view—even though it was clear that the criminal trial, if there was one, would come first. After all, a guilty verdict would make the plaintiffs’ civil case easier to win and might increase dramatically the defendants’ civil liability.
Kenny Foster’s family was suing three different entities, diffusing the responsibility and suggesting that the country club (and resident pro Harry Fallows as the club’s agent and employee), the net manufacturer, and I shared “joint and several liability.” The net company was on the hook because they had shipped the wrong product and the product itself was badly designed.
The country club was a defendant both because they had placed the net in a dangerous spot, a place where—if the net failed—someone could (and would) get hurt, and because even if Harry Fallows hadn’t removed the target, he still should have done something about the fact it was gone between the Tuesday he noticed it was missing and the Thursday when I killed Kenny Foster.
And little old me? I was definitely the person who hit the golf ball, slamming it through the netting without ever checking to make sure the material was intact—and, it was clear to the adults in the room, I was most likely the person to have ripped off the target, cutting it away with all the care kindergartners demonstrate when handed their first pair of safety scissors and a sheet of construction paper, and then buried it in a pocket in my golf bag.
I was, in other words, a liar. (Hadn’t I been fucking Theo Catton?
Didn’t that alone destroy my credibility?) I was among those who were going to be thrown under the bus because I was a wild and irresponsible dissembler with a bad past who couldn’t be allowed to get away with what I had done.
My sense was that the net manufacturer was going to elude this nightmare in the end.
They were insisting that someone had put the net in a ridiculous spot, one that certainly suggested the club cared not at all about “the help,” and then a teen girl had tampered with it, ruining its structural integrity.
As for the idea they had sent the club the wrong net, they were pretty clear: the club should simply have sent it back and asked for the correct one.
The Fosters were suing us all for three million dollars, a tremendous amount of money in 1979, arguing that the family had a “loss of consortium” with their son and brother that would last all of their lifetimes, and the figure was so large because it was such a grave misfortune for two parents and two siblings.
The plaintiffs also expected the defendants to pay their lawyers’ legal fees.
The country club and the net manufacturer had insurance companies that would pay their shares if they lost, but my family did not.
My father continued to insist this would never come to trial—civil or criminal—and I would never have to testify beyond the depositions. But he was kidding himself. I might not testify in my criminal trial, but I would in the civil nightmare.
I explained most of this to Tina that autumn night as we sat in our two beds in our bedroom. She asked plenty of questions as I went through the chain of events, and we took a lot of meandering detours.
“Mira’s Moppets?” she asked. “What’s a moppet?”
“A cute kid.”
“Who gave them that name? You?”
“God, no. One of their parents, I think.”
But, of course, we always came back to the grimmest of realities: the death of a seventeen-year-old boy.
“And this caddy…he’s really why you gave up golf?”
“Yeah.”
“But all you did was hit a golf ball like you probably had a zillion times.”
She was wearing a Lanz nightgown with images of irises on it. She had a stuffed zebra the size of a beach ball in her lap. Sometimes around her I felt like a porn actress: kind of smutty and just too fucking knowledgeable about things that I really should have known nothing about.
“I never checked the nylon,” I said.
“Were you supposed to? No.”
“I don’t know. I just wish I could go back in time.”
“Were you nervous during those depositions?”
The honest answer would have been, Well, less so during the second one than the first, but that was mostly because I was so coked up that I just spewed words with the relentless force of a waterfall.
Or I could have been truthful but offered a less crazed tidbit: Yes.
I felt like the lawyers were always trying to trick me.
Instead, I said, “My dad was there and he got me a good lawyer.” Both were true, and neither made the depositions any easier.
But I’d decided that I couldn’t drop any more of my shit on this nice girl from Vermont in a Sound of Music sort of nightgown.
She didn’t like me, but maybe now she would at least understand me. Perhaps she’d even feel bad for me.
“Good,” said Tina. Then: “Three million dollars. That’s a lot of money.”
I recalled how on the day I had killed Kenny Foster, my mother had said that she never wanted to know what the final settlement figure might be, because she didn’t want to know the fiscal value of a human life.
But, alas, some lives had more value than others.
Did I tell Tina that my father had said to me the other night on the phone, “There’s no way they’ll get anywhere near three million bucks for Kenny Foster.
He was just a kid. There’s absolutely no way to gauge what kind of earning power he would ever have had. ” I couldn’t. I didn’t.
“Yeah, it is,” I agreed. “I wish I didn’t know how big.”
“Because it’s the thing that makes you feel bad?”
“Oh, Tina,” I said. “Everything makes me feel bad.”
Which was a lie. Weed and coke actually made me feel good. And sex, which I missed, made me feel very good.
“Is there…more?”
There was. I’d come this far: I should have told her about Theo. Maybe Theo and Dennis and Professor Holes ’n Poles. But I didn’t. I said there wasn’t, and whatever chance of a friendship we might have had would soon vanish when she’d hear about them from someone else.