Chapter 19 Freak Accident #3
I thought often about the reaction of the other girls in Capen to me the last night I had been there, and how they were one film reel away from pouring a bucket of pig’s blood on my head.
I hadn’t yet heard from any of them, but in the coming days, I would.
Tina and Jean both mailed me letters of apology that were very sweet.
They wrote how sorry they were. Tina even said that she hoped, when I returned, we could try again to be friends.
I wrote back that I’d like that, though the truth was she must have known that I’d never return.
I might see her again if Ethan and I continued to see each other, but the dean of students was right: the campus was too small and I really shouldn’t be there.
I didn’t know the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder back then, and it wouldn’t even become an honest-to-God diagnosis until the following year, 1980.
But I think just seeing the exterior of Capen House or parts of Smith might have sent me spiraling.
Contentment was fragile and new, and uncertainty would continue to ground me like fog for a long time.
It would just be too easy to allow that miasma and murkiness to cover me like dirt on a casket, and send me back to the bathtub to clean it away with an X-Acto knife.
When Marie Morris called, having learned what I’d done in a bathtub at Smith, she had no idea I knew she had revealed to Annie Bainbridge that I’d also had a fling with an NYU professor.
As she babbled with real sweetness and angst about how devastated she was when she’d heard, I decided not to confront her with the truth that she couldn’t keep (as the Brits might say) really good dish to herself.
A few days later, she took the train from Poughkeepsie to Tallmadge, and I understood our friendship would be fine.
I was touched. I forgave her without having to say those words, an act not so much of uncharacteristic grace as atypical calm.
A near-death experience will do that for you.
Whenever Cleon Barker called our house, I’d get on one extension and my father the other.
Usually, he called on weeknights after my father had returned home from the train station, as my mother was pouring him his second (or third) scotch of the night—the first (or the second) downed in the smoky bar car as the train trundled its way through Harlem, the Bronx, and southernmost Westchester.
(Still, three drinks were fewer than four, and I continued to be grateful for my parents’ newly minted moderation.) I would run upstairs to my parents’ bedroom and lift the receiver, while my father remained in the kitchen.
My mother, as had become her habit on these phone calls, would hover beside him, her ear as close as possible to the telephone.
“Okay, everyone on?” Mr. Barker would ask, his tone upbeat, even jovial, some nights.
Other evenings, he might be all business.
Never, for my sake, was he somber. No matter what news he had to report or what he wanted to discuss with my father and me, always he’d give it a positive spin: the last thing he wanted to do was say anything that might lead the kid who’d attempted to kill herself to try once again.
When it was clear that none of the defendants in the civil case, for different reasons, were going to settle, and when it was decided among us there would be no joint defense agreement, a trial date was set for what would be the first (and perhaps only) criminal case: mine.
Ladies first, you might say.
If I were found guilty of removing the target and destroying the structural integrity of the net, there was the possibility there would be no criminal trial for the country club or the net manufacturer. And, thus, for them, their exposure in the civil settlement would become considerably less dire.
The trial would begin Monday, March 3, 1980, at the Westchester County Courthouse.
I was unsure how I would spend the rest of the winter back home with my parents, but at least some of the time I would be meeting with my lawyer in Manhattan to prepare for my star turn in a case that was being spun pretty much as follows: privileged rich girl with too much attitude recklessly kills a poor student with so much promise.
Spoiled kid versus the memory of Horatio Alger.
This was all about class: a spoiled golfer whose callous indifference to the rules led directly to the death of a caddy with pluck and luck who was going places.
I’m sure I had done little to change this narrative when, one December evening after meeting with Mr. Barker at his Park Avenue office, I was spotted by a New York Post reporter outside the Saks Fifth Avenue windows, all of them gussied up for the holidays.
I’d been inside shopping beforehand, buying Christmas presents for my parents and Spencer and Ethan, and I’d make page seven the next day—not the gossip pics that adorned page six, but right beside them.
I did not look at all like a deer in the headlights.
I was a pretty girl in a beret and Frye boots with bags in both hands who was, according to the caption, the spoiled bitch who’d wrecked a driving range net because I didn’t approve of its design.
I would turn twenty that spring. But, I suppose, I had ceased to be a teenager long before that.
Looking back, my childhood was over the day Theo Catton wrote his telephone number for me on his scorecard, and my adolescence ended the day—not far from that eighteenth green—when I drove a golf ball into Kenny Foster’s skull.